Zaid

I'm talking things like data analysis, legal research, and CRM workflows.

And then by early February, Anthropic took over the market narrative.

They started dropping industry-specific plugins nearly every week.

One week, it was insurance companies.

The next week, it was logistics and wealth management and marketing.

And every time one of these plugins would come out, stocks in that industry would tank.

Analysts called this the SaaSpocalypse.

We did a whole deep dive on it, and we're gonna talk more about that in a bit.

So yeah, the market was feeling a bit jittery about AI, and then things took another dramatic turn on February 28th.

That's when U.S.

and Israeli forces launched military operations against Iran, and then things escalated quickly from there.

Iran responded with drone and missile strikes on cities and energy infrastructure across the Gulf region.

They also effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which has about 20% of the world's oil supply pass through it every single day.

So millions of barrels of oil could no longer move through the Strait of Hormuz, causing oil prices to go vertical.

Brent crude was up 57% in March alone, hitting highs of $120 a barrel.

For context, oil was trading around $70 a barrel before the conflict started.

In all of that sense, shockwaves through the entire market because higher oil prices means higher gas prices, which means higher inflation, which means the Fed couldn't cut interest rates anymore.

So that dragged down the market.

And by March 31st, the S&P 500 was down 4.6% for the year, while the NASDAQ dropped around 7%.

That was the worst quarterly performance for those indices since Q3 of 2022.