Jason Douglas

What investors are responding to is the war and the risk that this prolonged shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz has a much more longer lasting effect on energy prices that pushes up inflation around the world, which tends to make bonds less attractive, which tends to cause central bankers to jack up rates to bring inflation back down.

On top of that, in a couple of places, we have some fiscal worries.

The UK has some political turmoil.

It's not quite sure what's going to happen to the prime minister there.

In Japan, the government here is talking about possibly a bit more borrowing to support households through the energy shock.

And in the US, of course, there's still this big fiscal deficit and big spending plans there.

So these kind of add to investors' fiscal concerns.

Rising bond yields do tend to take the wind out of stock market rallies.

Higher borrowing costs tend to, you know, eat into corporate earnings and make it harder to make profits.

And in a world where energy prices are going up, it certainly isn't good news for households and businesses.

We have seen stocks come off a little bit in the last couple of days, nothing too drastic, but it's certainly something that stock investors want to keep an eye on.

A March higher in bond yields doesn't necessarily equal good news for stocks, far from it.

They didn't want any rocking of the boat, if you know what I mean.

There has been, and there still is, a bit of anxiety, particularly around Taiwan.

There's this lingering concern that President Trump, in this pursuit of some grand bargain or trade deal with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, will in some way weaken American commitments to Taiwan and American commitments to the region.

They would probably take a degree of reassurance from what we've heard so far, but we're only halfway through the summit, so I don't think nerves will be entirely soothed until the whole thing is over.

We actually had a pretty volatile week.

There was a big tech sell-off, especially software-related companies.

The Dow has less software exposure.

It fared better and has been hanging out just below record high for quite a while.