Wall Street is treating the Iran ceasefire like a polite suggestion, not a hard stop, and the result is a strange split-screen: oil is still volatile, yet equities keep climbing. Brent crude jumped back above $100 a barrel as Iran seized ships in the Strait of Hormuz, while Japan and South Korea stocks hit record highs after President Donald Trump extended the truce.
That calm looks fragile. The Economists’ read is that global energy markets are still exposed to a Gulf bottleneck, with traders lurching from relief to panic as the status of the Strait of Hormuz shifts hour by hour. Brent crude is still well below its late-March peak, but the margin for comfort is thin when one shipping lane can swing fuel costs, airline schedules, and petrochemical output across Asia.
That tension is feeding a separate argument on whether U.S. equities are getting too comfortable. Bank of America strategists say the Nasdaq-100’s run and the South Korea’s Kospi’s bubble-like behavior show how far risk appetite has gone, even as geopolitical shocks remain unresolved. In their view, semiconductors and other momentum trades are starting to look frothy, while the broader market is still being carried by a handful of winners.
For traders, that means the same narrative can still fuel two very different markets, at least for now. SoftBank Group and Samsung Electronics are riding the tech surge in Asia, while U.S. crude and equity futures are already hinting at a more cautious open. The real risk is that investors are pricing de-escalation in stocks and escalation in oil, and those two bets do not stay neatly separated for long.
