저자: JimCramer · 외국인
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이란 전쟁 관련 시장 반응이 예상보다 양호했음. 다우 -73p, S&P +0.04%, 나스닥 +0.36%로 장중 낙폭을 회복. 미국이 순 원유 수출국이 되어 중동 리스크의 경제적 영향력이 과거보다 작아졌다고 주장. 짧은 전쟁 기대감, 대통령 리더십에 대한 낙관, 엔비디아 신칩 기대가 반등 요인. 사모신용·소프트웨어 등 구조적 문제는 여전하다고 경고.
다듬은 글
Jim Cramer told you markets didn't mind the Iran war. 27,000 people watched. Here's why that reaction should actually scare you more than the conflict itself. isn't as important as it used to be economically speaking. Now that we're a net exporter of fossil fuels, or maybe stocks did fine today because there's optimism for a quick definitive win and we can go back to normal investing.
You know what? I think it's a bit of all three, which is how we got a much better day than anyone could have expected with the Dow dipping 73 points, S&P inching up 0.04%, but the Nasdaq ending up 0.36%. Holy cow. Let's consider the setup. Nasdaq and S&P futures opened weak, trading down a little more than 1%.
It looked like it's setting up for, I don't know, a not great day. Instantly we read though that the front right side of the New York Times, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was looking down 500. All right, that always sounds frightening, doesn't it? But let's face it, down 500 at Dow 4,900 is very different from down 500 at Dow 49,000, where we are right now.
It's a minor decline all things considered. Still as the night wore on, the S&P futures kept sinking to the point where they were down 2% at 3:30 a.m., which seems like the beginning of a truly nasty decline, doesn't it? Sell, sell, sell. But by 6:00 a.m. they were only down 1%, back to where they were at 6:00 p.m.
And when the market opened, we held right at that point. You know, we never breached it. The market simply didn't mind and buyers were emboldened to do some buying because we didn't go lower than the opening price. Sellers then pulled their offers. Next thing you know, we rebounded substantially from those lows with the Nasdaq really shining and the Nasdaq being a big problem in the month of February.
It's really worth asking why this happened, especially because many people were bracing themselves for their first really awful day of 2026. First, again, while we have a great rearview mirror of the oil market of the past, the Middle East simply doesn't matter to the markets as much as it used to. Back in the day we didn't produce enough oil, so we had to worry about being cut off by the key producers in the region.
If Iran had blocked the Strait of Hormuz 20 or 30 years ago, it would have been a huge deal for us. Perhaps an instant prelude to a recession. Now that we produce so much oil domestically that there's really nothing they can do to cut us off. It's all changed. That's huge and I think not well understood.
When West Texas crude opened up nearly $8 this morning, the price couldn't hold. Same with the gigantic gap-ups in Exxon and Chevron and the others. Without a panic, those prices were doomed to pull back, taking the stocks with them and that's exactly what happened. This is not the '80s or '70s where we had to be care- careful about being these hostile regimes in the Middle East.
It's 2026. These days we can bomb Iran, take out their leadership and Wall Street doesn't care. At least so far. On top of that, we know that when Qatar, an American ally that produces 20% of the world's liquefied natural gas, went offline after drones struck the facilities, prices around the world spiked double digits.
But in our country, natural gas kind of traded unchanged. Why? Again, because we have more nat gas than we know what to do with. We're not importing liquefied natural gas from Qatar. We're exporting with them to ex- We're We're competing everywhere around the globe with them and I think we have a lower cost price.
Of course, high global energy prices will ultimately impact us, too. The world price matters. Interest rates also moved up dramatically, something that suggests oil could stay high. Gasoline's going up, but there's a palpable sense of relief that the war seems to be going well. When you wipe out the supreme leader and many of his lieutenants, it's hard to believe that the war will last all that long.
Although maybe we've been too effective because who are we even supposed to negotiate with at this point? So far we're not doing a ground invasion. Almost seems like we were trying to remove the leadership and dismantle as much of Iran's military infrastructure as possible without putting too many of our troops at risk.
As long as there's no repeat of Iraq or Afghanistan, most Americans don't believe that a short-term war less than 5 weeks can truly impact us. Oil prices have been going higher and rates going lower in anticipation of a war. So maybe all that happened was a natural reversal today when we realized that Iranian defenses are almost nonexistent.
That's right, interest rates went up today. All we did was reverse the flight to quality though that we saw last week. So rates going back higher really didn't really didn't send us off the bullish track. Oh, and you you didn't hear it much on the news, but let's face this. Some Americans who own stock or could own stock believe that we are getting our way with the world, that we are ascendant because of this president.
I know some of you may think this is crazy, but others see the United States projecting power as bullish in and of itself. If we get a quick win, that may be a good reason for many people to think I got to buy a piece of America. Now does it make sense, all this? To me, this moment feels a bit like the first Gulf War.
You know, you got to really go back in time where there was a lot of negativity in the lead-up. But once the United States got involved, we saw that much of the vaunted Iraqi Republican Guard was a paper tiger. So the price of oil collapsed instantly and the stock market roared. Buy, buy, buy. Now it's true that we didn't have a wave of negativity going into the conflict with Iran, but oil having creeped up last week in fear of war, when the leadership of Iran got taken out, it did feel like a replay of 1991 with the Gulf and Iraq.
Maybe much better because far fewer service people are in harm's way. If you were to ask me if the market was too bullish today, I'd say it certainly feels like we've forgotten a lot of the problems that dogged us last week, but the problems are still there. We didn't seem to care at all about the pain in the software group even as last week we thought these stocks were finished, bought down by AI platforms that can write cheaper code uh than than humans and they do it in abundance.
We didn't seem to worry about the big declines in the private equity firms like KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, all which stocks went higher. We worried about Freddy We Freddy about Blue Owl, a private credit firm that last week looked to be the epicenter of a mini meltdown. The stock actually rallied 13 cents.
Hey, at least it didn't go down. The problems of private equity spread to the big banks last Friday, but but both were much similar tame today. Oh, and the supposedly disappointing tech companies from last week led by Nvidia? We saw press reports this week that Nvidia is about to announce a new chip that can compete with pesky offerings from competitors.
Several companies, including long-standing Nvidia customers, haven't bragged about how they make a particular kind of AI semiconductor, ones that for inference, and Nvidia, well, looks like they may have something against that that could be better and that's why its stock rallied nearly 3%. When the stock of the largest company on Earth goes higher, it changes the coloration of the entire market.
Yes, it's that important to the averages and to the psyche of the average investor. Still we're in a fluid situation. Could we wake up tomorrow with the futures down 2% because something happened in the Strait of Hormuz that actually produces higher oil prices even if they are short-term? Maybe you learn something that makes us think that the fight will drag on longer than we think right now at least, that maybe we have to be more deeply involved.
These could change the market's mood, but the bottom line, right now what matters is that our country's own resources are much more bountiful than they used to be anytime in the last 50 years or longer. So even when the Middle East is a big political story, it's not necessarily a big economic story. Take away the importance of oil and the politics of Iran,
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