저자: Kevin · 외국인
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이란 대통령의 전쟁 종료 조건 발언으로 나스닥이 반등했으나 이는 숏 스퀴즈가 아닌 풋 스퀴즈 성격이며 펀더멘털 뒷받침은 약하다고 봄. 브렌트유가 움직이지 않는 점은 경고 신호. 이란 측이 요구하는 보장(추가 공격 금지, 배상, 미군기지 철수 등)은 실현 가능성이 낮고, 이란 대통령은 실권이 없어 협상 신뢰도 낮음. IRGC가 미국 기업들을 표적으로 선언, 호르무즈 통행료 및 홍해 해협 공격 가능성 등 지정학 리스크 증가. 현 반등은 월말 변동성 또는 데드캣 바운스일 가능성이 있으며 전반적으로 부정적이고 지속 불가능하다고 평가.
다듬은 글
Hey, a lot of folks are asking, "Kevin, what just happened in the markets?" We had this a massive plummet all of a sudden in USO, United States Oil, as well as the Brent version of this. Uh and then if we go ahead and look at the Nasdaq 100 Technologies Index, we had this run up almost all the way to our 577 line rejecting within about 79 cents of it.
It's a pretty powerful line, which, you know, unfortunately, we just moved down to uh over just the last few days. So, what just happened and what does it actually mean? Well, let me give you the bottom line straight. Uh I think that what we just saw was a squeeze of the shorts. I don't actually think we saw anything massively meaningful, and I'm going to explain to you why by providing details on how the government of Iran works and what commentary was made from all sides, including the Trump administration, Tehran, the presidency, along with the guarantees uh in Iran that are being demanded, the Ayatollah, the IRGC, uh and of course Israel.
So, let's break all of this down just by trying to provide as many facts as possible. Obviously, in the fog of war, facts are just the best available information we can get our hands on now. So, let's start. First, the foreign minister uh of Iran says that they are ready for any kind of ground confrontation from the United States, and he also played down any form of negotiations by literally saying that, "Oh, yeah, I'm getting direct messages," which sort of sounds like a DM on Instagram or something like that, uh from US envoy Whitcoff, but this does not constitute negotiations.
Which is kind of weird because then it's like, "Well, okay, well, if you're not negotiating with Whitcoff and Kushner, then with whom are you negotiating?" Who is it? I mean, maybe Who knows? Maybe J.D. Vance is the one texting him. I Who knows? But, again, they're claiming that their discussions with the Americans are do not constitute negotiations.
Tehran says it's also going to be really hard to rebuild trust with neighboring countries, especially since there are a lot of reports that countries like Kuwait and the UAE are kind of pushing the United States towards invading and, you know, cleaning up Iran once and for all. Kind of makes them feel a little isolated.
Now, Donald Trump says he wants a deal before the April 6th deadline, which is not his 5-day deadline. It is his actual which is also not his 48-hour timeline, right? It was a 48-hour deadline, then it was all right, fine, you have 5 days. And then at the end of 5 days it was you have 10 days. Just like some crazy posturing, but whatever.
Despite all this, Donald Trump says that Iran has agreed to some points in private talks and Trump is confident that a deal will be reached soon. But we kind of have to reconcile Trump's commentary with what Heggseth said this morning, which was that the coming days will be very decisive, which kind of implies that we're really just ramping up for an invasion or some form of longer strike, maybe over the 3-day weekend that we have here with Good Friday.
Markets closed on Friday, who knows, a lot of speculation around that. But I mean, so far we've been dropping new bunker buster bombs, 2,000-lb bombs. We've been dropping some of these via B-52s with flights going deeper into Iran, Beijing and Pakistan. So, China and Pakistan have issued a five-point plan for peace and they're trying to accelerate peace talks here, suggesting that Iran should be able to have peaceful nuclear programs and we should safeguard civilian and critical infrastructure.
Of course, we did have peaceful nuclear programs under the JCPOA. Of course, a lot of people are very frustrated by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and and said that it did nothing to limit Iran's ability to build up ballistic missile programs. Of course, Donald Trump did tear up that plan about 2 and 1/2 years after that peace plan or nuclear plan was negotiated by the Obama administration, saying that he would replace it with something better.
And then of course, here we are. We still don't have anything better. In fairness, Biden also wasn't able to get much during his administration, though he did get some inspections, which of course did stop again once Trump struck last summer. So, where do we sit right now? Well, one of the reasons we saw this big movement was not this sort of background information, but it was that potentially the president of Iran says that they are ready to end the war, but they want guarantees.
That was the headline that really hit the tape and really moved markets. Now, the first thing that I did was after we got through sort of the delayed quoting window on CNBC, or you could use other paid services to get this faster, right? I'm not pitching any here. You already know there's a coupon expiring for the Meet Kevin software and and programs I'm building your wealth in the Alpha reports software coming soon.
Stay tuned. But anyway, take a look at this. Brent hasn't moved at all, which is really weird. Brent is still sitting at 118. This is exactly where it's been sitting all day long, up about 5%. Now, WTI is down about 1%, but Brent is still knocking on the door of 120 here, which implies that at least the oil traders are like, this means nothing what the Iranian president said.
But when the Iranian president said this, the stock market moved, and that's where I actually think there's more of an equity sort of I don't want to call it a short squeeze, but more like a put squeeze, where a lot of people who had puts purchased, especially if we go look at the CNN Greed and Fear Indicator.
I always think it's funny that CNN puts that together. I feel like it'd be something like Bloomberg that would have a good page like this. But anyway, if you jump in over here, extreme fear, obviously extreme fear on market momentum, stock price strength, basically nobody's making new highs, right? So, no stocks are making new highs right now.
You've got market momentum, we're nicely under the 125-day moving average on the S&P 500 over here. They actually go to the Nasdaq and you zoom out to the day chart. I know there are a lot of lines here, sorry. Uh you're well below the 200-day moving average, which sits at 592 right now. And we're under that 577 line, which is obviously unideal.
Uh but if you go over to CNN Greed and Fear again, right here, you can see this real explosion over here in the put-to-call ratio. And I actually think what you have happening right now is this unwinding of puts based on this headline, not anything more than just end of the month profit taking, cleaning up of balance sheets, higher volatility because end of the month this is how you get higher lows, uh or sorry, higher highs and lower lows.
But, we have to understand some facts for a moment because that's obviously conjecture. We do know the fact that Brent really isn't moving, which is a red flag. But let's understand for a moment what kind of guarantees Iran is looking for and what the Iranian president uh actually has the power to do.
Nothing. Uh so, first of all, the guarantees that they're seeking are no future attacks from the Americans, reparations to pay for all civilian and military infrastructure, the ability to maintain their missile program, the closing of US bases in the region, and some form of guarantee that all these things are actually going to happen.
In my opinion, none of those things seem likely to happen. I do not think that Donald Trump or the Israelis are going to be paying the Iranians any reparations. I don't think that they are going to guarantee no future attacks. I don't even know how you could guarantee that. And I don't think they're going to close bases in the region.
So, to me, these guarantees that the president is looking for aren't going to happen. And frankly, those guarantees are just a reiteration of what we heard Iran tell us like a week ago. So, none of this is really good news. In fact, Israel, and I'm not trying to I'm not trying to be a bear on, you know, I'm not trying to poop on a green market here.
I'm just trying to be realistic with you. Like, we we already knew that. So, now Israel is coming out and saying that these guarantees that the president is now reiterating are expected to actually derail any negotiations. And just as those negotiations get derailed, reiterate that Donald Trump is actually going to send ground troops in.
At the same time, you have to understand how the presidency in Iran works. The president, unlike Donald Trump, has actually very little authority because you have this other president called the supreme leader who sets red lines for negotiations and has veto power over everything. So, it's kind of like you've got this diplomatic figurehead, kind of like the Dmitri Medvedev standing in front of Vladimir Putin, right?
And Putin's really the puppet master pulling the strings, so Putin can get past his term limits and then have infinite terms, right? That's all historical knowledge for you. Uh but anyway, you know, the supreme leader is really the puppet master. You know, no, no, no, no. You can't do that. Anyway, so the supreme leader has veto power over everything.
The supreme leader also is a parallel, uh well, I mean, in charge of, but has sort of this parallel accessory, if you will, called the IRGC, uh the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Now, what's really important about the IRGC is that the IRGC just issued a statement that several companies in uh in the Middle East, American companies, uh should be prepared for attacks against workspaces in the Middle East as they have now become fair targets.
So, employees, starting tomorrow, they say via statement number 51, April 1st, these companies are fair targets starting tomorrow. Apple, Oracle, Palantir, Microsoft, Alphabet, JP Morgan Chase, Cisco, HP, Intel, IBM, Tesla, Nvidia, and Boeing. Well, maybe that's why Oracle just laid off thousands of workers.
Okay, yeah, sorry. That's totally unrelated. Oracle is trying to finance their massive infrastructure bets, and they have a lot of debt and bills to pay, so they're deciding to chop heads. So, they have less money to or lower expenses, fewer expenses, and therefore more money available to pay for their loan debt.
But anyway, when when you link all of this together, you kind of start realizing, wait, the the president of of of Iran has no power here. What is this? Now, the Iranian Parliament has approved a toll on ships traver it increases the cost of that international blend of oil. What we usually find is when the international blend of oil becomes more expensive, you do drive up demand for Western oil, but that increase in demand also then increases the cost of Western oil.
So, you know, the consumer ultimately around the world pays for those tolls in the Middle East. There was a commenter where somebody asked like, "Hey, like who cares? Like let the people who use that pay the tolls." But economically, that drives the cost up of oil globally since demand will just shift to cheaper areas, and as demand shifts to cheaper areas, that no longer becomes cheap, and they all sort of equalize, right?
So anyway, that's not great. And on top of all of this, Donald Trump is still demanding that Iran end its ballistic missile program, reopen the Strait, and dismantle three nuclear sites, although they are deprioritizing the Strait, which I think is really just a distraction. I think they're trying to send this distraction so that way the Iranians sort of let their guard down, which implies that there's going to be some form of deep incursion by the US military, and then secretly they just whoops, we're taking over Hormuz.
Uh who who knows? That part of speculation. But uh my goal and target in this video uh you already know there's a coupon expiring today, so we don't have to reiterate all that. That's at meetkevin.com by the way. Remember, you lock in lifetime access to those programs. But my goal in this video was to share that I think there's some form of put squeeze, if you will, going on because the headlines don't really justify this sort of move up 3% on the Nasdaq.
And I think that's why oil really isn't moving. Now, it could also be a dead cat bounce. In fairness, if we uh if we jump over here, let's just hide all drawings for one. We've had a lot of negative sessions. Let's go ahead and hide uh the average candlesticks here. I like the average candlesticks. It makes it a little bit more uh viewable, if you will.
But if you go back over here from March 10th on, you could see we've had very few green sessions. We had two green sessions over here, slightly up, half percent and 1%. We had uh let's see here. Uh candlesticks aren't perfectly aligned. But whatever. We can clearly see this is this is our largest move over here with 3%, but otherwise we've mostly been looking at red days, a substantial portion of red days.
Uh and we can see this a little bit more broadly. Here we go. You can see this a little bit uh more simply here in just the overall direction uh of the Nasdaq 100. And the point of this is maybe this is just a dead cat bounce that we're seeing, that we got this, you know, extreme bearishness here all the way down to 555 on the Qs.
We're up 20 points on that now, which is great. Will it last? I don't know. I'm getting red headlines right now. US Embassy recommends all Americans in Saudi Arabia shelter in place. US State Department says it's tracking reports of threats to Saudi Arabia where American citizens gather. Right? I mean, that could be related to the IRGC threats to American companies in the region now.
So, to me, this None of this is good. I want the war to end. However, I understand that if it lasts longer, we just end up toying with the potential for recession. If we go to Polly Market recession odds, I find I find watching this somewhat very somewhat entertaining. You can take a look at recession by end of 2026.
We've kind of flatlined by around the sort of mid-30s level over here. Nothing's really changed. I don't know how that will change on a movement of, you know, ground invasion or whatever. If people think that will sort of price in a more rapid end to the war or, you know, deeper escalation into the quagmire.
But again, looking at Brent today, Big Brother Brent, bad news on Big Brother Brent. If we look at yields, we have a little bit of a relaxation on the 10-year and the 2-year by about three basis points equal. So, it keeps our yield curve stable. But beyond that, I I would not put a lot of stock in these presidential Iranian comments.
And I look at this as more of end of the month um volatility, if you will. We also have now Iran's foreign minister starting to talk of via Al Jazeera about the Bab al-Mandab Strait. I totally butchered that. Bob al-Mandab. One day I'll get that right. Anyway, that's over off the Red Sea. And what what we're finding is that Iran is starting to encourage the Houthis to start striking ships in that strait over on the Red Sea, which would really be attacking two major shipping straits, which isn't good.
So, again, broadly, I see a lot of this as negative news and not sustainable. Anyway, go to meetkevin.com to learn mor.
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