“The most nerve-wracking trading moment isn’t when you’re in the red. It’s when you’re just one step from your target, and the stock decides to U-turn right back to your stop loss!”
― Jayesh thakkar

1. Nasdaq Logs Longest Winning Streak Since 2021 as Investors Look Beyond War — War worries haven’t gone away. The Dow Jones Industrial Average’s energy-hungry components have the blue-chip index lagging behind other major benchmarks, on Tuesday notching a 0.7% gain. But with the nation’s largest banks reporting that consumers continue to borrow and spend, many think that the prospect for strong corporate earnings can outweigh the risks of a war-fueled slowdown. Tech has been a major beneficiary of the shift. A computing-power arms race among the biggest artificial-intelligence companies is driving huge demand for hardware like chips, servers and memory, and minting big winners in the stock market.
2. Trump Says Israel and Lebanon Agreed to 10-Day Ceasefire — US President Donald Trump said that Israel and Lebanon had agreed to a 10-day ceasefire, a move that would ease broader tensions between Washington and Tehran. Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon had threatened to derail the two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran and the potential for that truce to be extended.
3. US Probes Suspicious Oil Trades Made Before Trump Pivots – The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is leading the probe into trading of oil futures contracts on platforms belonging to CME Group Inc. and Intercontinental Exchange Inc., said the people, who asked not to be identified as the information is private. Both exchanges were asked to hand over data, the people said. The CFTC is looking into at least two instances over a period of about two weeks where trading volumes surged shortly before major announcements, the people said. Data requested from the exchanges include the so-called Tag 50 identifications of the entities behind the trades, the people said. On March 23, oil and stocks futures worth billions of dollars were traded 15 minutes before Trump said previously threatened strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure would be delayed. The president’s comments in a Truth Social post sent crude prices plummeting and equities soaring. A similar pattern was observed ahead of Trump’s April 7 announcement of a two-week ceasefire with Iran. Futures activity increased in the hours before the news, which caused both oil and gas prices to plunge.

The week ahead — Economic data from Econoday.com:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Weekly Summary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.