Bitcoin flinched. Equities didn’t. Guess which one’s the hedge.

Stock Market Edge

Stocks Shrugged. Oil Did the Worrying. A record tape met a fresh strike and chose denial.

1. Premarket snapshot: S&P 500 futures held near 7,538 by 06:00 ET, barely off Wednesday’s 7,520.36 close. The Nasdaq sat at 26,674.73, the Dow at 50,644.28, both fresh from Tuesday’s records. Crude rose 3% overnight; the equity bid noticed and decided not to mind. The VIX stayed near 16, the market’s way of saying everything is fine.
2. Sector rotation: Energy and defence firmed, the one corner that read the news. Technology, industrials and materials had carried Tuesday; energy, staples and healthcare lagged. Micron’s 19% two-day sprint to a $1 trillion cap dragged the chip trade past Nvidia, proving the AI rally now needs two trillion-dollar mascots, not one.
3. Earnings or guidance: Salesforce, Synopsys, Agilent, HP and Dick’s all reported after Wednesday’s close, a buffet of guidance for a tape that mostly wanted the war to be over. Zscaler had already dropped roughly 20% on soft revenue guidance, a reminder that beating is optional but guiding badly is not.
4. Cross-asset nuance: The 10-year yield held near 4.47%, the dollar near 99. Gold sat flat around $4,480, declining its traditional role. Bonds and bullion treated the strike as background hum whilst crude did the entire job of pricing risk, as usual.

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📊 There’s a level on SPX I’m watching closely this morning. My full analysis briefing has it – plus what happens if we hold it, and what happens if we don’t. [Read it here →]

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Crypto Market Edge

The Hedge Hedged Against Itself Bitcoin met its big geopolitical moment and left.

1. Price snapshot: Bitcoin traded near $74,200 by Wednesday’s close, down 2.2% and roughly 30% lower this year, still wedged below $80,000. Ether held the low $2,000s, about half its October peak. For an asset sold as a crisis hedge, it has an unfortunate habit of selling off during crises.
2. Flows & positioning: BlackRock’s IBIT shed about $528 million in one session, its second-worst day on record. Spot Bitcoin ETFs had already bled some $1.55 billion over six days this month; Ether funds managed ten straight days of outflows. The institutional bid that built the rally has quietly become the institutional exit.
3. Leadership & rotation: No alt rotation arrived to soften the blow. The ETH/BTC ratio stayed weak and Bitcoin dominance held high, the usual huddle when macro turns ugly. XRP and Solana ETFs drew the only inflows worth naming, which is faint praise. Dominance this high tends to mean the rest of the market is simply waiting to be told it may move.
4. Catalysts & roadmap: More than 40 firms, Coinbase and Kraken among them, backed stock-style disclosure standards, an industry asking politely to be regulated. DTCC aims to put tokenised stocks, ETFs and Treasuries on Stellar by 2027, so Wall Street can lose money on-chain too.

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TL;DR – The Bottom Line

• Oil jumped 3% on fresh strikes whilst S&P futures held near 7,538. Wall Street has decided the Middle East is a subscription it keeps forgetting to cancel.
• Bitcoin fell to about $74,200 whilst gold sat flat near $4,480. The hedge sold off and the relic held its ground. Marketing, meet reality.
• BlackRock’s IBIT logged its second-largest outflow on record, roughly $528 million in a single session. The rally’s favourite engine is now running firmly in reverse.
• Salesforce and friends reported after the close; Zscaler had already fallen 20% on weak guidance. Beating estimates is nice, but promising more is apparently mandatory.
• Warsh’s first full week meets Friday’s PCE near 3.3% with oil freshly spiking. A hawkish chair, a supply shock, and the worst possible timing.

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📌 Fun Fact

The two-mile choke point Why one narrow channel moves the whole oil market

Roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day pass through the Strait of Hormuz, about a fifth of global supply, in shipping lanes only about two miles wide in each direction.