Brian Stewart

Great to be here.

Tax Day is coming up.

I think Iran is probably top of the mind or Iran, I suppose, depending on where you're brought up.

So this week we saw the ceasefire be agreed to.

With that, we saw a rally in chip and AI stocks, basically a relief rally

risk back on kind of thing.

So we saw Intel up about 22%.

We saw Micron up about 13%.

This is over the last five days.

Broadcom up about 20%.

If you look at the XLK, which is the broad tech

etf um that was up three percent on wednesday when the um the ceasefire was announced that's the third biggest one day gain of 2026. um one of the only days that was a higher jump for that was on march 31st which was also a rally on peace hopes so you see the market very tied to what's going on um in the geopolitical space um you know if you

keep up.

It's tough because different headlines come out all the time.

I think the most common characterization of the ceasefire is fragile.

There's a lot to be decided.

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed.

There's still

um, conflict between, um, Hezbollah and Israel, which kind of threatens to, uh, break the peace.

So, um, remains to be seen what's going to happen, but for this week anyway, uh, the market is, um, taking a positive outlook, um, that we're taking steps forward towards, towards peace.