Last week was a flight tracker for a plane that never lands. The destination was peace with Iran, the gate kept changing, and the pilot kept posting on Truth Social instead of talking to the tower.

Stocks clawed back from deeply oversold territory on ceasefire whispers, then retreated when reality whispered back. The week started with the S&P 500 staggering under a brutal Q1 (down roughly 7% on the year as of Friday the 28th) and ended with every major index posting a solid weekly gain, even as crude oil still sat above $111 a barrel Thursday morning.

Good news mattered. Bad news got dismissed. The market wanted permission to be bullish so badly that it was willing to ignore the building still on fire behind it.

Whether the worst is actually behind us is a question for next week. The market has already given its answer, which is worth noting because it is frequently wrong.

By Thursday's close (markets shut Friday for Good Friday, because even capitalism takes Easter off), here's your weekly scoreboard:

The sector story was equally dramatic:

Here's what's funny about that energy number: crude retreated on ceasefire optimism, which means the very thing killing the market started helping it. The Iran war that wrecked Q1 became the hope trade that rescued the first week of Q2. You can't make this stuff up. Or rather, you could, but nobody would believe you.

The PHLX Semiconductor Index tells the whole story in miniature. Down -4.2% on Monday. Up +5.0% for the week. When this market decides to bounce, it doesn't send a memo first.

YTD, the report card still reads like a bad semester:

Q1 ended Tuesday, and investors had to sit with a quarter that looked like it was designed by someone running a revenge experiment on growth stocks. But the individual stock breakdown is where things got truly unhinged.

Winners (oil runs everything now):

Losers (growth got sent to detention):

It's the kind of divergence that makes you wonder if you're looking at one market or two different centuries.

And then there's the Magnificent 7, the group that spent most of 2024 and early 2025 acting like gravity was optional. Q1 brought them back to earth:

Oil made the old guard great again. The "new economy" got grounded. Not a single one of them escaped.

The Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide. Not something most retail investors spend time thinking about, until 15–16 million barrels of daily oil flow gets choked off and your gas bill starts looking like a rent payment.

The numbers here are genuinely staggering. WTI crude is up more than 50%. Brent has risen more than 45% over the past month heading into the week. Americans collectively spent an extra $8 billion on gasoline since the war started. Diesel hit $5.41 nationally, a 44% jump, and on the West Coast it reached a record $7.36 per gallon, a price that would've been satire six months ago.

BP's chief economist summed it up: this isn't comparable to any disruption in the past.

Every piece of rumor sent crude lower and stocks higher. Every escalation reversed it. The entire market, all of it, got held hostage by a waterway most people couldn't find on a map.

Think about that next time someone tells you their quant model accounts for "all variables."

Bond markets were getting feisty. Rate-hike odds hit 22% mid-week, the 10-year yield touched 4.48%, and things were heading somewhere nobody wanted to go.

Then Powell showed up at Harvard and did the thing he does better than anyone in Washington. Threaded the needle. "We'll look through the oil supply shock." But also: "Don't test us if inflation expectations become unmoored." Which is Fed-speak for we're fine, we're also watching, and please don't make us do something everyone regrets.

Worth remembering: the Fed's tools don't meaningfully impact supply shocks. Rate hikes don't drill oil wells. Useful context for a market that was briefly pricing in a hike because of a war it can't control.

By Monday's close, rate-hike odds collapsed from over 20% to around 5%. That's the most market-moving thing a Fed Chair can do: talk a panicked market off the ledge without actually changing anything. Powell earned his paycheck that week. Possibly the only person in Washington who did.

Tuesday was catharsis. Pure, uncut, mainlined-straight-into-the-portfolio relief.

The trigger? CNBC reported Iran's president spoke with the European Council and that Iran was "prepared to end the war" with guarantees against further attacks. That's a seismic shift from the outright ceasefire rejections of days prior.

Consumer confidence data on the same day showed inflation expectations jumping to 6.2%, the highest since August 2025. The market saw that number, shrugged, and kept buying. Tomorrow's problem. Literally.

When investors have been coiled in a defensive crouch for weeks, hope doesn't trickle in. It detonates.

The ceasefire hold didn't last unchallenged. Obviously.

Wednesday brought a Bloomberg report that Trump told aides the U.S. would withdraw in two to three weeks regardless of a deal, which was immediately followed by a Truth Social post threatening to keep bombing Iran's infrastructure if the Strait stayed closed. Consistent messaging has never been the strong suit here.

The market's reaction was pure indecision. Gains in the morning. Selloff at noon when Iran denied requesting a ceasefire. Slow grind back by close. This is the defining pattern of the entire conflict: investors desperately want permission to be bullish, and the facts keep wandering off-script.

Thursday cranked everything to eleven. Trump's evening address confirmed the U.S. would continue strikes without a deal, and crude surged 11.3% to $111.48 per barrel. Then a Bloomberg report that Iran and Oman were drafting a Strait traffic protocol pulled the market back from the brink, because of course it did.

The S&P 500 finished Thursday essentially flat after being down more than 1% at the open. Given the morning they had, that counts as a win. Like surviving a car crash and calling it a good commute.

While geopolitics consumed every headline, companies kept reporting. Not everyone passed the exam.

Nike (NKE) was the week's most painful irony. Beat earnings estimates, then got hammered -15.5% anyway on weak guidance and an admission the turnaround was "taking longer than expected." Translation: good backward-looking numbers don't mean much when the path forward looks like a fog machine.

Tesla (TSLA) delivered a Q1 miss on Thursday and shed another -5.4%. The bull case has quietly shifted away from car sales and toward AI and robotics, with roughly $20 billion in capex committed to that pivot. But the story needs time, and right now the market is grading on deliveries. Deliveries were a D-minus.

Eli Lilly (LLY) had a week to remember. FDA approved its weight-loss drug, Foundayo; the stock popped 3.75%; and the GLP-1 empire keeps expanding. Turns out the hottest drug category in medicine makes a pretty reliable portfolio strategy too.

Sysco (SYY) agreed to acquire Jetro Restaurant Depot for $29.1 billion, and the stock immediately cratered 15.28%. When the market punishes your acquisition on day one with that kind of violence, your board probably should've seen it coming.

The AI world had a characteristically eventful week, which is a polite way of saying it was chaotic, expensive, and vaguely embarrassing for at least two companies.

OpenAI raised a historic $122 billion in commitments at an $852 billion valuation, putting Sam Altman in the rare position of having raised a round large enough to be compared to national GDP figures. That's either visionary or insane. Probably both, if we're being honest.

Anthropic accidentally released 1,900 files and 512,000 lines of code from Claude's coding assistant. The company called it "a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach," a distinction their PR team is probably exhausted of explaining while simultaneously battling the federal government in court. Busy quarter for the "responsible AI" brand.

And then there's Mercor, which counts both OpenAI and Anthropic among its customers and suffered a data breach at the hands of a hacking group. Y Combinator president Garry Tan called the exposed training data "a major national security issue" given its potential value to China.

So, to recap: money flowing in one door, credibility leaking out another. That's been the AI industry's entire quarter distilled into one sentence.

If Tesla is Musk's headache, SpaceX is his happy place right now, and Wall Street has noticed.

A widely anticipated $75 billion IPO is brewing, boosted by publicity for NASA's lunar mission and SpaceX's recent acquisition of xAI, which puts the company firmly in the AI infrastructure game. It's the rare hyped story with actual hardware to back it up. Wedbush's Dan Ives is already speculating that SpaceX and Tesla could merge in 2027 into a unified AI, space, and defense conglomerate. Whether that silences critics who say Musk is stretched too thin or confirms their worst fears depends entirely on who you ask.

Friday's surprise jobs report capped the week nicely. 178,000 new jobs in March versus expectations of roughly 50,000. A blowout beat suggests the labor market hasn't fully digested the oil shock yet. The strength likely keeps the Fed on hold, watching inflation rather than pivoting to cuts anytime soon.

Sound familiar? Strong economy. Hot inflation. A Fed that can't move. We've been here before. The sequel rarely improves on the original.

Polymarket's economy contracts this week are a perfect mirror of the market's own split personality. Traders are simultaneously pricing meaningful odds that the Iran ceasefire is formalized in Q2 while also betting that above-2% inflation persists through year-end. That sounds like a contradiction until you realize the market priced in both "the war ends" and "oil stays elevated" on the same Tuesday. Cognitive dissonance is a tradable asset now, apparently.

Recession odds remain stubbornly elevated, consistent with the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment reading hitting its lowest level since December and those 12-month inflation expectations sitting at 6.2%.

Rate-hike probability whipsawed between roughly 22% and 5% across the week as Powell's commentary and war headlines took turns driving. Translation: the smart money doesn't actually know either. They're just better at pretending they do.

One thread of genuine consensus: SpaceX IPO markets are active and pricing a 2026 listing as more likely than not. About the only unambiguously fun trade on the board.

Note: Precise Polymarket contract values were not available in source files; the above reflects the directional sentiment captured in market reporting for the week.

Gold did exactly what it's supposed to do this week: acted as ballast in a portfolio getting tossed around by war headlines and oil shocks. Boring. Reliable. The friend who shows up with soup when you're sick and doesn't ask questions.

When Tuesday's ceasefire optimism sparked a risk-on rally and drove oil lower, gold still held its bid. It's insurance against the possibility that peace doesn't actually arrive, and smart money doesn't celebrate until the treaty's signed.

With 12-month consumer inflation expectations at 6.2% (the highest since August 2025), gold's role as an inflation hedge is no longer theoretical. It's active, and traders pricing in continued oil-driven price pressures are keeping the metal well-supported.

The green energy transition conversation also quietly resurfaced as a bullish tailwind this week. The Iran war exposed just how fragile fossil fuel supply chains really are, and capital flows back toward electrification and clean infrastructure favor gold, copper, and the broader materials complex. War is bad for basically everything. Except, somehow, the things it's accidentally good for.

Real estate was this week's quiet overachiever, finishing as Thursday's best-performing S&P 500 sector at +1.5% as Treasuries found their footing and the 10-year yield pulled back 13 basis points to settle at 4.31%.

The January Case-Shiller Home Price Index (released Tuesday) rose 1.6%, beating the 1.3% consensus. Revised prior reading was 1.9%. The directional message is clear: home prices aren't collapsing despite the higher-rate, higher-energy-cost environment. That's the good news.

The bad news is affordability. Mortgage applications fell 10.4% on the week, diesel-driven supply-chain costs are filtering through to construction materials, and the real estate market finds itself in the strange position of being price-resilient and demand-challenged at the same time. Like a restaurant that still has great food but raises prices every month for a year. The regulars stopped coming.

The FHFA Housing Price Index came in at +0.1%, slightly above the 0.0% consensus, suggesting the market is absorbing rate shocks more gracefully than the bears predicted. But between $4-per-gallon gas, elevated mortgage rates, and shaken consumer confidence, the path to broadly affordable housing is a long road with a lot of orange cones. And the construction crews can't afford diesel to get there.

Retail sentiment this week was the emotional equivalent of someone swearing they're calm while visibly stress-eating. Consumer confidence headline numbers were "not abjectly concerning" per one analyst, but inflation expectations among everyday Americans surged to their highest level in months, and gas prices near $4 a gallon were driving the kind of real, tangible anxiety that no amount of Fed reassurance can actually fix.

On social media and trading forums, the dominant play was momentum-chasing the ceasefire narrative. The same investors who were loudly bearish on Monday had pivoted to quoting Tuesday's blockbuster rally by Wednesday morning. Classic. That's the kind of whipsaw behavior that keeps therapists and market analysts equally busy.

Institutional positioning told a more disciplined story. Palo Alto Networks' CEO bought $10 million of his own stock on Friday before the week even started. IBKR data showed oversold technical conditions driving early positioning. Smart money was already repositioning while retail was still refreshing the headlines.

When insiders are buying with their own money and retail is chasing on a 12-hour delay, one of those groups has better information. I'll let you guess which one.

This week's market tasted like a cigar you found in a drawer from last year. Burned unevenly, gave you a decent rush in the middle, and left you coughing a little at the end. But you'd do it again because, honestly, the alternatives weren't great either.

The main course was geopolitical tension with a reduction of central bank reassurance, served on a base of technically oversold conditions that gave every dip buyer a reasonable excuse to pull the trigger. Dessert was a jobs report so good it almost felt rude, showing up at a party the market was trying to quietly wind down.

Call it a recovery meal. Nourishing enough to keep you upright. But nobody's declaring the diet over just yet.

Here's the honest summary of the week: the market bounced, and the bounce was real. But so is oil still sitting above $100. So are 12-month inflation expectations at 6.2%. So is the Iran war, which remains technically ongoing as of Thursday's close.

The S&P 500 finished at 6,582, the Nasdaq at 21,879. Better numbers than we had on Sunday the 29th, but both indices remain below their 200-day moving averages, which is a technical way of saying a relief rally and a recovery are not the same thing. Worth writing down.

The wins were real. The jobs report was genuine. The Fed communications were deftly handled. And ceasefire diplomacy, even if still messy, has shifted the directional narrative from "this gets worse" to "this might actually end."

Next week brings inflation data, and that's the real test. Is the oil shock bleeding into the broader price level or staying contained? That answer matters more for the market's trajectory than any Truth Social post. Probably.

Q1 was a gut-check. Q2 is where we find out what this market actually believes about itself.

Good luck out there.