⬆️ What’s up? Nearly everything

US stocks were off to the races on Wednesday after the US and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire, during which time oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz are expected to pick up as the two sides look to negotiate a more enduring peace.

• Does your business need oil to move? Congrats, your stock is up! It was a great day for stocks where oil is a high input cost, like cruises and airlines: American Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Carnival, and Norwegian Cruise Line. 

• Is your business the kind of AI momentum trade that requires people to feel pretty good about the economy in order to justify investment? Congrats, your stock is up! It was a solid day for memory and optics names like Micron, Coherent, Seagate Technology, Western Digital, Corning, Lumentum, Ciena Corp., Sandisk, and Applied Optoelectronics.

• Is your business highly speculative in a way that requires market enthusiasm to be downright frothy to do well? Congrats, your stock is up! It was a great day for quantum computing companies (D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, Infleqtion, and IonQ) and others like Plug Power, Rocket Lab, and SoundHound AI.

Not everyone can win, though. Do you make money off of expensive oil? Bad luck for Exxon, Dow, CF Industries, and APA Corporation — your stock ate it yesterday.

The Takeaway

So, all set for the markets? On one hand, this is a decisive market reaction rewarding negotiators with tangible financial market improvements as a result of the ceasefire. 

On the other hand, transits through the Strait of Hormuz remain at wartime lows and have not returned anywhere near pre-conflict levels, and there are still missiles flying in the region. To recap, the ceasefire contingent on opening the strait has neither ceased the fire nor opened the strait.

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The first big release from Meta’s Superintelligence Labs is here: a new multimodal reasoning model called Muse Spark. Shares of Meta spiked on the news, extending gains it had made earlier in the day on optimism over the ceasefire with Iran.

• Meta has been playing catch-up in the generative-AI race, watching startups OpenAI and Anthropic leap ahead with ever more capable models, after the bungled rollout of its Llama 4 models.

• “Looking ahead, we plan to release increasingly advanced models that push the frontier of intelligence and capabilities, including new open source models,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads. 

• “We are building products that don’t just answer your questions but act as agents that do things for you. I am optimistic that this will support a wave of creativity, entrepreneurship, growth, and health. I’m looking forward to sharing more soon.”

Meta says the release is the first in a Muse family of models, which it says it will scale up over time. The benchmark scores released by Meta show Spark to be capable, with solid scores among popular tests, but not any huge leaps over leading models from Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Google.

The Takeaway

After Meta went on an expensive hiring spree assembling an all-star team of AI researchers, investors have been eager to see the fruits of this team, and to see if the accompanying billions of capex dedicated to power it — $115 billion to $135 billion this year alone — were worth it. 

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The most valuable pharmaceutical company in the world has made a killing selling diabetes and weight-loss drugs that are widely viewed as the most effective in the market. But as the GLP-1 market matures and some analysts argue that it may be smaller than what Wall Street has priced in, the pharma giant needs to secure its next chapter beyond weight loss and diabetes. Thanks to its soaring sales, the company is using acquisitions and a partnership with Nvidia to accelerate drug discovery.

How an “AI Factory” is powering the next chapter

• ⛽ Gas: Gasoline’s average cost has hit $4.16 per gallon, and markets* appear to be pricing a solid chance of that continuing to rise despite the ceasefire news. Right now markets are pricing in a 56% chance that gas is over $4.20 per gallon by the end of the month, though that’s down from 90% ahead of the ceasefire news. Still, markets think there’s a 21% chance gas finishes April north of $4.50 per gallon.

• 🏛️ Fed: Kevin Warsh is President Trump’s nominee for chairman of the Federal Reserve, but when precisely he’ll be confirmed remains a bit of an open question. Markets indicate there’s only a 52% chance he’s confirmed before May 15, when Jerome Powell’s term ends. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

• Release of February PCE inflation data (Fed’s preferred gauge)

• JPM Retail Round Up Forum continues; Levi Strauss management scheduled to speak after solid earnings on Wednesday

• Dow hosts Annual Meeting of Shareholders