Weekly Roundup: Iran Hormuz Shutdown Drives Oil to $82, Bonds Hit 5.2%

Let's be honest: if someone told you this week's biggest market story would be a naval blockade in the Persian Gulf, you would have assumed you fell asleep in a geopolitics lecture from 2003. And yet here we are. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed, Iran is not budging, and oil settled above $82 per barrel on Friday after a week of tanker attacks, Pentagon posturing, and zero diplomatic resolution in sight. The Airlines for America CEO put it bluntly this week: jet fuel is double what it was a year ago, and carriers are eating the majority of that cost. Buckle up on your next flight, literally.

But the real plot twist of the week was in fixed income. The U.S. Treasury auctioned $25 billion in 30-year bonds at a 5.216% yield, the highest level since 2001. That is not a typo. Former House Financial Services chair Patrick McHenry went on air to say the bond market is speaking loudly about US overspending, and the 10-year hit its highest yield since 2007. BlackRock's Mike Pyle flagged upward rate risk as the number one threat to the equity rally, citing historic corporate debt issuance, fiscal deficits, and household borrowing all competing for the same pool of capital simultaneously. When BlackRock sounds nervous, you listen.

On the sentiment front, things got interesting fast. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment reading for August showed Republican sentiment dropping 9.5 points in a single month to 78.7, even as the White House tells Americans to simply accept higher gas prices. July retail sales dropped by the most in over a year, with car sales hit especially hard. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 briefly touched a new record high of 7,758 on Thursday after cooler CPI data eased rate hike fears. The disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street has never been more photogenic.

The week's biggest individual winners were a masterclass in divergence. $WDAY surged 18% to 30% intraday on reports that Silver Lake is in acquisition talks, its best single-day move in over a decade. Dan Ives called the SaaS apocalypse narrative fictional and pointed to the deal as putting a floor under the entire software sector. $SNDK posted its best week since January, up 35% after projecting mid-to-high teens revenue growth and roughly 80% non-GAAP gross margins by 2028-2030, with JP Morgan slapping on an overweight. $CRWV jumped 19% on a $104 billion backlog plus another $25 billion in post-period commitments. And $CSCO was up 61% year-to-date heading into earnings, then dropped 3.7% after hours despite a beat, which is what happens when you are priced for perfection in an AI trade that has no tolerance for merely good results.

Tom Lee maintained his S&P 7,900-8,000 target for end of August and sees a path to 8,400-9,000 by year-end on the back of 2027 earnings estimates rising from 395 to a projected 425. Bears are citing elevated margin debt and bond supply as the wet blankets. The housing market quietly deteriorated in the background, with single-family starts down 5% year-to-date, though Toll Brothers is somehow thriving because rich people are a different economy entirely. Gold broke above key resistance and is running a textbook accumulation pattern, and Berkshire Hathaway spent $16 billion on Alphabet while doubling its Delta stake and more than doubling Macy's, which is either contrarian genius or Warren Buffett's version of doom-scrolling. The week in one sentence: everything that could be on fire was, and equities went up anyway.