The past seven weeks were a genuine stress test — not of the economy, but of how markets respond under pressure. A geopolitical shock forced a rapid repricing of risk, followed by a sequence of adjustment and recovery. But beneath the index numbers, leadership shifted decisively: value over growth, smaller over larger, non-U.S. over U.S. The dispersion was not random. It tracked the pricing structure already embedded in global equity markets — and that is where this commentary begins.

Markets are adjusting quickly to a more fragile backdrop as rising oil prices, shifting rate expectations, and renewed geopolitical tension reprice risk across sectors. This environment is being defined less by collapse than by abrupt adjustment, raising the more important question: not what happens next, but how investors should respond when uncertainty moves faster than the facts.

There’s a fight happening right now over the future of artificial intelligence, between a White House that wants no guardrails and an AI company whose Pentagon contract is under review for insisting on them, between companies spending hundreds of billions on a productivity revolution and a market that’s rotating away from them in real time. Who profits, who gets displaced, who sets the rules, these questions are being answered right now, not in theory but in stock prices, in Washington, and in the portfolios of anyone with meaningful exposure to U.S. technology.

But first, the numbers.