On February 28, the U.S. and Israel launched over 2,000 strikes across 24 of Iran's 31 provinces.

Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed. So were the chief of staff, and multiple IRGC commanders.

Iran retaliated by hitting 27 U.S. bases across nine countries, also targeting oil tankers in one of the most consequential waterways on earth.

Markets didn't wait for a press briefing.

They started pricing the worst.

20% of the world's oil passes through a 21-mile chokepoint between Iran and Oman.

So does 20% of global LNG — most of it Qatari.

When an IRGC commander declared it "closed" and threatened to set ships "ablaze," tanker traffic collapsed to near zero.

5 tankers were damaged. Including the world's largest LNG producer — QatarEnergy.

That's not a threat to a trade route. That's a threat to how Europe heats itself this winter.

Brent crude surged 9% to $83.

WTI jumped over 7% to $76.

European natural gas futures jumped over 40% in a single session.

Gas prices at the pump rose 11 cents overnight, crossing $3 a gallon for the first time in 2026.

Some stations are expected to see spikes of up to 85 cents this week.

With 555 confirmed dead in Iran, strikes still active into day three, and Iran launching retaliatory waves across nine countries:

Those aren't base cases.
But they stopped being unthinkable around the time tanker traffic hit zero.

Dow futures dropped 855 points Tuesday morning.

S&P fell 1.7%, Nasdaq 2.2%.

The UAE shut its stock exchanges entirely — a market signal as stark as any price move.

Gold crossed $5,200, up 100% in twelve months.

Defense stocks are bid. Energy names are climbing on every headline.

On the other side:

Bitcoin dropped to $63,176 on the day of the strikes.

It's hovering around $66,300 now — caught between risk-off selling and holders who bought it specifically for moments like this.

That tension hasn't resolved either way.

Trump says the operation runs four to five weeks.
The market is not fully convinced.

The gap between a contained operation and a prolonged regional conflict is the difference between $85 oil and $150 oil.

Between a correction and a full repricing of inflation expectations and every growth forecast built on the assumption that energy stays cheap and supply chains stay intact.

Whatever happens in the Strait over the next two weeks will matter more to markets this year than any Fed decision or earnings report.

Whether tanker traffic resumes. Whether Qatar restores LNG output.

Whether Iran's retaliation escalates. Whether it exhausts itself after absorbing strikes on 131 targets and losing its top leadership.

The world just got significantly more expensive to run.

How long that lasts is the number nobody has.

Software stocks just entered a bear market. They’re on track for their worst quarter since 2008. Wall Street is watching AI eat the entire sector alive.

How much can Palantir rise while everything else is selling off?
Literally running the war for the Pentagon using Claude AI for analysis.

How can one of Palantir's co-founders read the macro so well? He headed into 2026 holding nothing but cash. Right before the conflicts started.

What are the gas price predictions after the bombs dropped?
Every $10 increase in oil adds roughly 25 cents at the pump.

Monday morning, as Operation Epic Fury entered its third day: Lockheed Martin hit an all-time high.

So did RTX Corp. Northrop Grumman was up 6%.

AeroVironment — which makes the drones being used in the strikes — jumped 10%.

Palantir, whose AI software helps coordinate exactly these kinds of operations, gained 6.5%.

Defense stocks don't usually move like that.

They moved like that because a war started.

At least 19 members of Congress bought defense stocks in the months following Trump's election.

Most of them still held those positions at the time of their most recent financial filings.

Here's a sample of what that looks like in practice:

Rep. Scott Franklin (R-FL) bought between $15,000 and $50,000 in Lockheed Martin in February 2025.
Lockheed makes the F-35s and the bunker-buster bombs currently being used in Iran.

Rep. James Comer (R-TN) bought between $1,000 and $15,000 in RTX on January 21, 2025 — the day after the inauguration.
Rep. Cleo Fields (D-LA) bought between $50,000 and $100,000 in RTX in August 2025.
RTX manufactures the Tomahawk missiles that have been flying into Iranian territory since Saturday.

Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI) bought between $100,000 and $250,000 in Palantir — a purchase that has drawn scrutiny for a potential STOCK Act violation.

Several of these members sit on defense and homeland security committees.

Trump's proposed military budget for the coming year exceeds $1.5 trillion. That’s a 50% increase over current levels.

Before this week, it faced at least some political friction.
After Operation Epic Fury, that friction largely evaporates.

Active wars have a way of doing that to defense budget debates.

The same Congress that will vote on that budget has members who own shares in the companies that bill against it.

The weapons used in the Iran strikes — RTX Tomahawks, Boeing bunker-busters, General Dynamics submarines, Lockheed aircraft — are not generic defense products.

They are specific line items in specific contracts awarded by the government these members help run.

In 2025, Congress made over 13,000 stock trades totaling $635 million.

Defense was one of the most concentrated sectors.

The trades were legal. The disclosures were filed.

Everything happened in plain sight, which is arguably the most remarkable part.

Trump mentioned a stock trading ban at the State of the Union.
He got bipartisan applause — Elizabeth Warren clapping alongside Republicans.
Then nothing happened.

The bill he endorsed doesn't actually prohibit trading.
It just adds a waiting period.

86% of Americans support a full ban.

0% of Congress members have stopped trading.

Monday was a good day if you owned defense stocks.
A tiny group of people knew that was likely to be true before the rest of us did.

Some of them work in a building with a dome on top.

(by feargreedmeter)

Spectral Capital (FCCN) just hit a milestone most people missed:

The company now owns 500+ patents in quantum computing, and they're not slowing down.

They want 1,000 by the end of 2026.

For context, the ENTIRE quantum computing industry has fewer than 40,000 patent applications worldwide.

IBM; the global leader, filed 191 in 2024.
Google filed 168.
Spectral filed close to 500 in about a year.

Their pitch is bold:

"What Nokia was to mobile phones, Spectral Capital will be to quantum computing."

So what's the reality?

Spectral trades on the OTC market at around $4.20 a share with a ~$377M market cap.

But here's where it gets interesting:
They've been on an acquisition spree.

They bought 42 Telecom (UK-based, $26.1M in 2024 revenue, 38% growth, profitable).

They acquired Telvantis Voice Services with earn-out targets of $240 million in profitable revenue for 2026.

And they just signed a deal to buy Italy-based Intermatica.

Their stated goal?

$450 million in profitable revenue in 2026.

They've also hired a new CFO and are planning a NASDAQ uplisting.

The big question:

How does a $4 OTC stock stack up against IBM, Google, and Microsoft?

Those three have spent billions, but they've filed fewer patents than you'd think.

IBM filed 191 in 2024.
Google filed 168.
Spectral is looking like has 500+ in roughly a year.

Now, patents don't guarantee dominance.

But, they're sitting on a licensing goldmine, collecting royalties from the same companies spending billions to build the quantum future.

You don't have to build the best quantum computer if everyone else has to pay you to build theirs.

At $4 a share, the market hasn't caught on yet.

That's either a problem, or a HUGE opportunity for smart investors.

Click here to learn more

In Q3 2025, Peter Thiel's hedge fund Thiel Macro began quietly unwinding its public stock portfolio.

First to go: all 537,000 shares of Nvidia, sold near all-time highs.
Then most of his Tesla position.

In their place, he opened new positions in Microsoft and Apple — a rotation that looked, at the time, like a fairly conventional flight to quality.

Then in Q4, he sold those too.

By January 2026, Thiel Macro held zero publicly disclosed stock positions.

One of the most connected men in Silicon Valley — co-founder of PayPal, early Facebook investor, co-founder of Palantir — had moved his entire fund to cash.

What happened after he sold is worth walking through slowly.

Nvidia, which Thiel exited near the top, subsequently reported $68 billion in revenue — a $2 billion beat — and the stock still fell 5.5%.

The market had already priced in perfection and then some.

Tesla, which he sold before year-end, dropped another 8% into 2026.

The broader software sector is down 27% year to date.

Every major index has been under pressure since January.

Then on February 28, Operation Epic Fury began.

Markets opened Monday to:

Thiel Macro, sitting entirely in cash, was unaffected by all of it.

Peter Thiel is not just a former tech investor who got cautious at the right moment.

He is the co-founder of Palantir Technologies — the company whose AI platform is currently being used by the Pentagon to coordinate battlefield analysis for the Iran operation.

Palantir was up 6.5% on Monday.

It hit an all-time high while the rest of the market was selling off.

The company Thiel helped build is, functionally, infrastructure for the war that just started.

Thiel himself holds no Palantir shares in his hedge fund's disclosed positions.

What he does hold is a founding stake, board relationships, and decades of institutional knowledge about what Palantir does, who it does it for, and when that work tends to accelerate.

He didn't need to buy Palantir.
He already owned it in the way that matters.

There is a version of this story where Thiel simply read the macro environment better than almost anyone else — saw stretched valuations, rising geopolitical risk, and an overheated AI trade, and made a rational decision to sit out.

Plenty of smart investors saw the same signals and stayed in anyway. He didn't.

Every exit was well-timed.
The rotation in Q3 was well-timed.
The full liquidation in Q4 was well-timed.

The move to cash before a war, a market selloff, and an oil shock was well-timed.

At some point, the accumulation of well-timed decisions becomes its own kind of data point.

What you do with that is up to you.

Source: Stock Analysis