In today’s pre-mkt summary for Subscribers: Stocks dropped as fresh attacks on more oil tankers in Iraqi waters escalated the Middle East conflict, pushing Brent crude back above $95/bbl despite the IEA's unanimous decision to release a record 400 million barrels from emergency stockpiles (largest ever, including 172M from U.S. SPR). 10-year yields slipped, gold and silver edged higher, and #btc eased. Adding to uncertainty: more institutions capped withdrawals from private credit funds amid heavy redemption requests.
All eyes are on next week's Fed meeting (Mar 17-18), where the federal funds rate is likely to be left unchanged while a new dot plot and economic projections could reflect higher oil's potential drag on cuts despite softer Feb payrolls. I believe equities will reclaim record highs once the conflict resolves, oil retreats, and slowing jobs growth prompts further Fed easing later this year. 2026 S&P 500 EPS forecasts at $310 imply a reasonable 21.8x P/E = 4.6% earnings yield, ~40bp premium to 10y Treasuries, in line with non-recession norms. I remain cautious on $Tesla(TSLA.US) given declining 2026-2030 estimates and accelerating competition in unsupervised autonomy from $Alphabet - C(GOOG.US), $Baidu(BIDU.US), $Amazon(AMZN.US), and others, plus $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) opening its AI autonomy stack to OEMs in 2026.
The copyright of this article belongs to the original author/organization.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not reflect the stance of the platform. The content is intended for investment reference purposes only and shall not be considered as investment advice. Please contact us if you have any questions or suggestions regarding the content services provided by the platform.
