Pentagon · Financial Times · S&P 500 · Wall Street · Iran · New York · Fortune Technology
Wall Street is the biggest winner of the Iran war—and the S&P 500 just turned positive for the year
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Markets opened down nearly 1% across the indexes on Monday, but news-aggregating accounts online and on social media picked up a report by New York Post Pentagon reporter Caitlin Doornbos.
Key facts
- Brent crude began dropping steeply, down roughly 4% to about $4.50 a barrel, roundtripping hundreds of millions of dollars notionally across the front-month contract
- A trader who caught only those 10 sessions would be sitting on a 35% compound return, against roughly 13% for the index over the same period
- Wall Street calls it the TACO trade—“Trump always chickens out,” coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong after Trump abruptly paused his “liberation day” tariffs in April 2025
- The median S&P 500 company is now growing earnings per share at a double-digit pace—the fastest since 2021
Summary
Soon, the headline traveled. Brent crude began dropping steeply, down roughly 4% to about $4.50 a barrel, roundtripping hundreds of millions of dollars notionally across the front-month contract. “This took off unnecessarily,” Doornbos wrote. Brent crude began climbing again, hitting $103 briefly before again descending on some more typical jawboning news; Trump saying that he’d been called by the “right people” in Iran, that they truly want a deal, etc. Ultimately, the day ended on a high: The S&P 500 had risen 1.02% to 6,886.24, wiping out every single day of losses since the beginning of the Iran war on Feb. 28. Now, most readers know well that the war has not ended. President Trump took the risk of enacting a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports at 10 a.