Category Weekly Reports

A broad and detailed market recap of the week just ended, plus a forward-looking framework for the next one, with focus on inflation spillover, oil structure, U.S.-Iran diplomacy, bank earnings, producer prices and the increasingly important gap between a stabilizing tape and a still-strained real economy.

Executive summary
The week that ended on Friday, April 3, was not a clean return to bullish calm. It was a relief week inside an unresolved macro problem. U.S. markets were closed on Good Friday, so the real trading week ended on Thursday, April 2. By then, the S&P 500 had posted a weekly gain and broken its five-week losing streak, while Wall Street had spent the entire week bouncing between fear of an extended energy shock and hope that the war-driven disruption around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz might not become a permanent economic wound.

The week that just ended was not simply another down week for U.S. equities. It was a week in which the market became more severe, more selective and much less willing to pay for fragile narratives. The S&P 500 closed Friday at 6,506.48, the Dow at 45,577.47, the Nasdaq at 21,647.61 and the Russell 2000 at 2,438.45, extending the losing streak for the major U.S. indexes to a fourth consecutive week. The Russell 2000 is now in correction territory from its January high, which matters because it says the weakness is not just about a few mega-cap wobbles. The market is repricing risk appetite more broadly, especially for smaller and more rate-sensitive equities

The week that ended on Friday, March 13, did not deliver a clean “risk-on” or “risk-off” message. It delivered something more difficult and, for active traders, more important: a selective tape in which macro stress was real, energy shock risk was impossible to ignore, but not every pocket of the market reacted in the same way. That distinction matters. A market that falls together can often bounce together. A market that starts separating winners from losers under pressure is usually telling you that stock-picking, catalyst timing and sector choice are starting to matter more than headline beta.

Taxing unrealised gains: why the Dutch “experiment” is a red line for investors A closer look at the Actual Return Box 3 proposal in the Netherlands, why a 36% tax on unrealised portfolio gains is structurally toxic, and what this…

An editorial look at what the new Iran–Israel–US conflict could mean for global power balances, for oil and shipping routes, and for the sectors and individual stocks that tend to benefit or suffer when the Middle East becomes the epicentre of risk.

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The new week opens with markets forced to reprice global risk after coordinated US–Israel strikes on Iran and retaliatory missile attacks on US bases across the Gulf and on Israel itself. Oil and shipping risk premia jump, while gold and defense stocks rediscover their role as hedges. At the same time, AI and chips are coming off a volatile stretch after Nvidia’s “beat and fade” reaction, Rocket Lab posts record revenue and backlog, and small-cap biotech continues to trade on single-name catalysts rather than broad factor flows. This recap looks at where we are, how the Iran conflict feeds into energy and risk assets, and which names go on the watchlist for the coming days across defense, energy, space, biotech and AI.

This week’s recap walks through a classic “binary” market: indices inch higher while gold hits new records and oil creeps up on tariff and Iran risk. In biotech we see clean wins (VNDA, Telix) versus brutal setbacks (GRAIL, RGNX), while defense and space keep riding record military spending and drone/missile contracts. The briefing for February 23–28 closes with what really matters next: Nvidia’s earnings, the U.S. PPI print, and the first concrete signs from the Pentagon’s USD 1.1bn drone program.

Wall Street just closed a choppy week where enthusiasm about AI and data-center spend ran into valuation nerves, while inflation data kept the “soft landing” narrative alive. The coming days will be dominated by U.S. GDP, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge (core PCE), fresh PMIs and a cluster of sector-specific catalysts across biotech, space, defense and AI small/mid caps.

Week Ahead and Recap – January 31, 2026
Gold near record highs, AI shockwaves in gaming, and a cluster of high-grade biotech catalysts from DF-003 in ROSAH syndrome to camizestrant in ESR1-mutant breast cancer. This is your condensed map for the week.