The TACO Trade Is Alive: S&P Hits Records While the World Is Literally on Fire
Markets are at all-time highs, Brent crude is above $108, and the biggest week of earnings season is here. Let's talk about all of it.
Ticker Ratings
| Ticker | Rating | Entry Price | Current | $ Gain | % Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MU MICRON TECHNOLOGY INC | buy | $508.45 | — | — | — |
| SNDK Sandisk Corp | buy | $1039.26 | — | — | — |
| MSFT MICROSOFT CORP | buy | $422.89 | — | — | — |
| AAPL Apple Inc. | hold | $269.22 | — | — | — |
| META Meta Platforms, Inc. | buy | $676.00 | — | — | — |
| UAL United Airlines Holdings, Inc. | sell | $91.65 | — | — | — |
| QCOM QUALCOMM INC/DE | hold | $145.40 | — | — | — |
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both closed at all-time highs on Sunday, putting the index on track for its best month since 2020 — all while the Strait of Hormuz sits at 5% of normal flow, an assassination attempt went down at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and Brent crude is trading at $108-109. Welcome to 2026, where 'peak uncertainty' is apparently a buy signal.
The engine driving this rally? AI, obviously. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index is up 37% in April alone after an 18-day winning streak, with $MU and $SNDK surging on Melius Research buy initiations. Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI are collectively running at ~$70 billion in annualized revenue — more than double from the start of the year — which is doing a lot of heavy lifting for the 'AI capex is justified' thesis heading into a monster earnings week for the hyperscalers.
The one genuine bear case? Goldman just hiked oil forecasts again, projecting $90 Brent by Q4 base case, with an adverse scenario that would make your gas bill cry. Adam Parker over at Trivariate is flagging investor complacency on sticky oil — and he's not wrong that a consumer squeeze at the pump doesn't show up in earnings until it really, really does.
Seventy days of Hormuz disruption, a record-setting semiconductor index, and the Fed holding rates — the market's message is clear: it's not ignoring the chaos, it just thinks it's already priced it in. History suggests that's either genius or the last thing bulls say before things get interesting.