The S&P 500 fell roughly 5% in March alone, its worst monthly performance since 2022. The Dow snapped a ten-month winning streak. The Nasdaq entered correction territory. Ten of eleven S&P sectors finished the quarter in the red. 

The one exception was energy, up more than 12%, which tells you everything you need to know about what drove the damage.

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This one handed markets a valuation reset, a geopolitical supply shock, and a policy trap all within eight weeks of each other, and none of them resolved before the other two arrived. 

That sequencing is what made Q1 feel relentless in a way that the index numbers alone don't fully capture.

The AI valuation reset that began in late 2025 was still running. Software was getting repriced as agentic AI moved from concept to credible threat. Private credit was showing early stress in software-linked portfolios. The Fed held rates steady and the dot plot showed fewer cuts than the market wanted. Q4 GDP came in at 0.7%, well below what a healthy economy produces. The labor market looked resilient in the headlines. Underneath, hiring had already slowed outside of healthcare. Into that backdrop came the event that redefined the quarter. On February 28, US and Israeli forces struck targets in Iran.

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Oil ran from around $65 in late February to an intraday high above $119 before settling into a range of roughly $90 to $112 as the quarter closed. 

That move didn't just raise prices. It reset the entire inflation path. Qatar declared force majeure on LNG contracts. Fertilizer prices jumped more than 30%. Aluminum smelters took direct hits. Gas at the pump crossed $4 per gallon for the first time since August 2022. 

Three consecutive Treasury auctions failed as real money stepped away from duration. Consumer sentiment fell to 53.3 in March, with one-year inflation expectations jumping to 3.8%. The Federal Reserve held rates and acknowledged the shock explicitly, but seven of nineteen participants projected no cuts for the full year.

Semiconductor names, memory, and data center hardware held up as hyperscaler capex commitments remained intact. Software broke hard. The iShares Software ETF finished the quarter down more than 20%, on pace for one of its worst three-month stretches since 2008. 

Private credit gates spread from software-linked funds into consumer and small-business lending vehicles, with some managers capping withdrawals near 45 cents on the dollar. 

The quarter closed with the S&P down roughly 5% on the month, energy the only sector in the green, and the market still pricing an unresolved war.

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The relevant comparison for Hormuz is not 2022's Russia-Ukraine shock, which was a demand story layered on top of a reopening economy. It is closer to 1990, where a genuine supply disruption hit an economy that was already slowing. 

In 1990, the S&P fell roughly 20% from peak to trough. The recovery took about seven months from the low. The 1991 Gulf War rally, once it came, was one of the fastest in postwar history precisely because positioning had been so defensive. The businesses that absorbed the shock without balance sheet damage led it. The sectors with the most direct fuel exposure lagged for longer.

The same pattern shows up in tech cycles. The 2022 rate shock compressed the entire tech complex indiscriminately. By mid-2023, hardware and infrastructure names had separated cleanly from software, with the former recovering fully and the latter taking considerably longer. 

The current split has a precedent, and that precedent favors the infrastructure layer on a twelve-month view once the macro pressure eases. Private credit stress, when it has appeared in prior cycles, has typically taken one of two paths: systemic in 2008, or contained and self-resolving in every episode since. 

The current episode has more in common with the non-systemic episodes, in part because the regulated banking system entered this shock with stronger capital than it carried in 2007.

That is typically where markets stop falling. Markets tend to bottom not when the news gets good but when the worst plausible outcomes stop getting worse. 

The Strait of Hormuz remains a live variable, but diplomatic architecture now exists that did not exist in early March. Two extensions have passed. Active communication channels, however indirect, are running. The consumer has not broken. Gas at $4 is uncomfortable and visible, but the break point that prior cycles identified, sustained prices above $5 for ninety days or more, has not been reached. Corporate America, as FedEx demonstrated in mid-March, has more efficiency buffer than the bears credited going in.

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Bonds didn't cushion the shock. Gold sold the escalation. The Fed couldn't rescue what oil was doing. Those are genuinely difficult conditions. They are also the conditions under which the trades that replace them get built. 

The quarter is closed. The positions were taken. The volatility ahead belongs to Q2, and Q2 begins with more information, more diplomatic contact, and more data than Q1 had at any point. The market has seen worse quarters than this one. It tends to come through them faster than positioning allows.

Q1 removed the old playbook. Q2 starts writing the next one.