It looked, for a few dark overnight hours, like the kind of open that keeps families up. Back in mid-April, Dow futures had fallen more than 500 points after Donald Trump announced that the United States would blockade the Strait of Hormuz. By the time the closing bell rang that Monday, though, the story had softened: the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped only around 50 points, to near 47,900, after a notable intraday recovery. The S&P 500 actually rose 0.2% and held above 6,800, and the Nasdaq Composite tacked on 0.6% to finish above 23,000. Investors, it seemed, were betting the standoff would eventually find a resolution.
The oil market was less forgiving. West Texas Intermediate crude climbed more than 5% and pushed past $101 a barrel after Trump declared the US Navy would blockade every vessel that entered or left Iranian ports in the strait; Brent crude leapt as much as 9% and traded near $102. US Central Command stressed that ships merely passing through toward non-Iranian ports would not be impeded. The announcement landed after weekend negotiations in Islamabad fell apart — Vice President JD Vance went home without an agreement, pointing to Iran’s refusal to end its nuclear weapons program — while Iran’s own demands ran to war reparations, control of the strait and the freeing of frozen assets. Talks were not dead: per Axios, mediators from Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey would keep engaging both governments, while the Wall Street Journal reported that a return to military strikes was on the table. All of it unwound much of the relief rally that had followed the April 7 ceasefire, which had briefly sent oil back under $100.
For ordinary investors, the meaning was captured by Clark Bellin, who leads Bellwether Wealth as its president and chief investment officer: “Investors are now back to the drawing board trying to reassess the fair value of stocks now that it’s clear that there is no end in sight to the conflict in the Middle East,”
The heaviest weight on the Dow that day was Goldman Sachs, down 2.5% despite first-quarter numbers that beat forecasts on earnings and revenue alike. Earnings per share reached $17.55 against a $16.49 consensus, while revenue came in at $17.23 billion versus $16.97 billion expected. Equities trading delivered a record quarter at $5.33 billion, up 27% from a year earlier. The sore spot was the fixed income, currencies and commodities desk, where revenue dropped 10% year over year to $4.01 billion — roughly $900 million light of StreetAccount estimates. Bank of America saw “solid” results overall, if “clouded by the FICC miss,” Wolfe Research found the quarter “disappointing” given lofty expectations, and Wells Fargo judged the shortfall “a little surprising relative to peer guidance and balance sheet growth.” JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup were all still to come in what promised to be a busy stretch of bank earnings.
Software carried the recovery. Oracle rocketed 8%, topping the S&P 500 leaderboard, on new AI-powered offerings for the utilities industry, Palantir Technologies added more than 3%, and ServiceNow and Workday each rose more than 5%. Inside the Dow, Salesforce climbed more than 3% on optimism about its artificial intelligence pipeline, Microsoft added around 1.6% and IBM roughly 1%. The rotation out of financials and into software defined the session, and semiconductor names held the previous week’s gains, which had been fueled by strong TSMC results and fresh AI spending commitments.
The human side showed up in the housing figures. Sales of previously owned homes ran at a 3.98 million annual pace in March, adjusted for seasonality — down 3.6% from February, below the 4.05 million consensus and the weakest reading since June 2025. Mortgage rates had climbed through March and peaked at 6.64% on the 30-year loan, then gave back roughly a quarter of a percentage point during the ceasefire, while the median sale price rose 1.4% year over year to near $409K. Elevated borrowing costs, the data suggested, were weighing on the rate-sensitive corners of the economy.
Bonds told the same cautious story: the 10-year Treasury yield ticked 3 basis points higher to 4.34% and the 30-year finished 2 basis points higher at 4.93%, as oil’s return above $100 reignited inflation worries already stirred by Friday’s Consumer Price Index. Yet the tape had context — the prior week had been the strongest since November, the S&P 500 up 3.6%, the Nasdaq up 4.7% and the Dow ahead 3%, so the modest Monday giveback read as a pause rather than a panic. A hot Producer Price Index reading, due that Tuesday with consensus at 4.6% year over year, was the next test. It was, in the end, a day when the worst-case open gave way to a shrug — and for anyone watching a retirement balance, that felt like relief.
