Well, President Trump saying the U.S. will consider a ceasefire when the Strait of Hormuz is open, and Trump telling Reuters U.S. does plan to leave Iran pretty quickly, but may come back for spot hits.
Of course, there's mixed messaging coming ahead of the president's national address this evening on Iran.
Wall Street just staged a dramatic comeback to closeout March.
Equities posted their biggest rally since May as oil pulled back briefly on hopes the conflict in the Middle East is nearing a resolution.
But in the middle of this massive relief rally, AI darling Nvidia tanked 7.6% in Q1 underperforming the broader market and slipping below its critical 200-day moving average.
Investors sold the news after Jensen Huang, the CEO, revealed a $1 trillion pipeline at GTC 2026.
The market is now questioning its premium valuation as customers shift focus to AI inference.
Also, when we're looking at the Mag 7, Microsoft just suffered its worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis, plunging 23%.
Meanwhile, Tesla fell 24% in Q1.
Well, joining us to dissect what's moving the market is Peter Tuchman, a senior floor trader at TradeMas.
Well, Peter, happy April, happy Q2.
It's great to have you on.
So I do want to ask you about the rally we saw yesterday, because you think it's not just about the messaging regarding the Middle East conflict.
I don't really think so.
You know, look, there are a number of things.
End of month, we've always talked about it.
End of months tend to either be a window dressing or profit taking.
And I really, you know, this is one of the hardest months this market has seen in a long time.
You just described it.
You're talking about all the darlings of the market are down more than 10, 20, 30 percent.
And so that that really made it difficult.
And so you've got all these hedge fund managers and you've got, you know, the allocations for whether it's hedge funds, mutual funds or basically 401ks need to rebalance themselves at the end of a quarter.
And so and also so there was a number there's probably three or four different things that set up almost a perfect storm, a positive perfect storm that's set up for yesterday's rally, whether it was it was catalyzed by the initial comments by the president, by the Iranian president, saying that it was rebuked eventually, but that they were looking to end this, that they were willing to end this conflict sooner than later.
I think that may have catalyzed it, but you had a month end, you had the way the market acted we opened up 60 about 60 handles we went up 90 we ended up you know and then some of these news started to trickle out but my gut is that you had really you had window dressing uh these guys who are going to be judged and graded by their month end performance and they had been beaten down so much that they needed to eke out any kind of a profit in the month.
A 3% rally made a huge difference.
Imagine that.
If you were looking at European health, they surely didn't want redemptions.
Think about February, March, April.
You and I went through February, March, April last year.
While I don't think that we can turn back the hands of time as we were able to last year because it was strictly financial, this is a geopolitical war zone situation.
I think it was window dressing.
I think it was a rebalancing of hedge funds institutions based on some 401ks.
And I think it was technically way oversold.
Rarely do you see the S&P 500, the RSI, Relative Strength Index, get to 15.
It barely ever gets to 20, and it had gotten to 15.
So from a short-term basis, the market was so oversold.
And so all of these components all together just sort of gave the market a green light to just roar.
And it did.
They were buying everything that was not tied down.
Yeah.
And Peter, as we head into a new trading month, as well as new quarter, I think perspective is so important because coming into this year, 2026, we have to keep in mind that we had three straight years of double digit percentage gains for the major U.S. stock averages.
And when we take a look at all asset classes, we know that we've been seeing plenty of volatility based on a lot of this uncertainty.
So what does diversification and risk reduction look like right now?
You know what?
Look, it's really it's it's hard to know what what.
If you look at the different sectors and see what actually has significantly changed in these, a lot of the stocks got sort of sold, the baby got thrown out with the bathwater.
Has anything significantly changed as far as MAG-7 goes?
Think of the software sector that is down 50% since the beginning of the year.
And you obviously saw MAG-7, you saw NVIDIA.
These are the stocks that really took this market up for the last three years, more than double digits for 23, 24, and 25.
And so, you know, as far as I'm concerned, I think, you know, are we going to look back?
We could really, you know, turn back time and go back to February, March, April of last year.
When we were in the middle of that sell-off, right, if you'll remember, in 11 weeks from February 19th, we sold off 20.8 percent.
When we were in the middle of that, it really looked like we weren't able to put ourselves in Mr.
Trump's mind.
We didn't know what he was doing.
That was sort of a function of the way he was disseminating the information. around tariffs, right?
That was what was scaring the market.
But when it was all said and done, and he told the market, let's go, everybody.
There's nothing to see here.
Let's buy it.
We bought it and we were able to get back to even by within four weeks.
And so, you know, this market has an incredible resilience when you can go up and down one, two, three percent in a day.
Right.
A 20 point selloff can be really rebuffed within a couple of weeks where, you know, our people The problem is when you have oil staying above levels of over $100, the inflationary effect on the economy is huge and it's going to start affecting, people are going to start seeing it in absolutely everything.
You know, the implications of that are bigger than I think even the administration presumed.
And I think that's where our problems sit, and that's where risk sits.
How long is this confrontation going to go on?
If we can get this all done, right, we're never going to be able to get back to what it looked like before the war started.
But I think economically, you know, will we be hitting record highs by the end of the year?
I kind of think so.
Well, Peter, finally, before I let you go, we have about 30 seconds here.
So where are you seeing opportunity right now?
Well, look, I think I would look at all the stocks like software that's down, you know, like Microsoft, like it's had its worst first quarter since the financial crisis.
There is nothing that has really changed in those sectors.
I would look at tech.
I would look at software.
You know, I would look at some of the energy names because at the end of the day, a lot of the chatter about data centers, that hasn't changed.
The trajectory hasn't changed.
The billions of dollars of cap expenditure. set up for that sector hasn't changed.
So the fact that the market is down and those stocks really get hurt really bad, I think that's going to be a buying opportunity.
It just goes back to things when things are on sale, but that the sector nothing significantly has changed in those names, then those are where the buying opportunities lie.
Well, Peter, I'm glad you joined me today because we're kicking off the second quarter of 2026.
And of course, in the next 48 hours this evening, we'll be paying attention to President Trump's national address at 9 p.m.
Eastern Time.
And although equity markets will be closed on Friday morning, we will be watching the jobs report coming out on Friday morning at 8.30 a.m.
Eastern Time.
So thank you so much for joining us today.
