Trump announced a two-week ceasefire before the deadline, causing oil prices to plummet by nearly 20% overnight, and global stock markets collectively rebounded. The risk premium of a 38-day war was squeezed out in one go, but only one of the three cracks laid in March has been closed.
1 | Two-Week Ceasefire Erases War Premium Overnight, Short Sellers Face Squeeze
Trump announced on Tuesday night at 8 p.m. before the deadline that as long as Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. will pause its strikes on Iranian power plants and infrastructure for two weeks. WTI crude oil saw a maximum intraday drop of 19%, plummeting from $117 during the day to $93 to $96, marking the largest single-day drop in nearly six years. S&P 500 futures rebounded by 2.5%, Dow futures surged by 1,000 points, Nasdaq 100 futures by +3%, Nikkei by +4%, and South Korea's Kospi by +6%. The Prime Minister of Pakistan invited both the U.S. and Iran to Islamabad for negotiations on April 10.
Reuters cited Goldman Sachs Prime Brokerage data, stating that hedge funds sold global stocks at the fastest pace in 13 years in March, with the MSCI Global Index down 7.4% and the S&P 500 down 5.1%, all due to expectations of an Iran war. After a month of consensus was nailed down, a ceasefire declaration on the evening of April 7 reversed all short positions overnight. Two weeks exchanged for a night of risk liquidation, and the countdown to the next plunge has begun. The market is now trading not peace, but April 21, the new deadline.
(Source: Bloomberg / CNBC / NBC News / Reuters / Financial Times / Goldman Sachs Prime Brokerage)
2 | Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI, "Project Glasswing" Locks Strongest Model into Collaborator Whitelist
Anthropic revealed on Monday that its annual revenue has exceeded $30 billion, more than triple the $9 billion at the end of 2025, surpassing OpenAI's $25 billion for the first time. In the Enterprise LLM API market, Anthropic holds 32%, OpenAI 25%, and Claude Code in AI programming 54%. The IPO in October is valued at $3.8 trillion.
Following this, on Tuesday, they launched the "Project Glasswing" plan, partnering with Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Broadcom, Cisco, Linux Foundation, Palo Alto Networks, and CrowdStrike, enabling the undisclosed cutting-edge model Claude Mythos Preview to scan open-source software vulnerabilities. In its initial phase, thousands of high-risk vulnerabilities have been found in all mainstream operating systems and browsers. Mythos is not publicly released, only authorized for these partners and around 40 infrastructure organizations. The Pentagon only classified Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" last week, while the UK Prime Minister's Office drafted a dual listing plan for London in the same week. OpenAI offers the strongest model to everyone, while Anthropic locks the strongest model to a few partners, ushering in an era where consumer monopolies are being taken over by corporate contracts and sovereignty choices.
(Source: Bloomberg / Financial Times / CyberScoop / Fortune / Engadget)
3 | March Triplet Risk Explosion, Ceasefire Only Shorted One
March is the cleansing month for U.S. risk assets, with three pressures bursting simultaneously but failing to resonate with each other. First, hedge funds dumped global stocks at the fastest pace in 13 years, triggered by the Iran war. Second, The Wall Street Journal reported that private equity financing hit a 10-year low, with Blue Owl's flagship fund OCIC experiencing a record 21.9% quarterly redemption rate, causing the $1.8 trillion private credit industry to show its first crack. Third, on April 2, Trump signed an executive order imposing up to 100% tariff on patented drugs, effective for large pharmaceutical companies after 120 days and for small firms after 180 days.
The ceasefire on the evening of April 7 only shorted the first crack. The redemption pressure in private credit came from AI disrupting software companies' cash flow expectations and was unrelated to the Middle East situation. The 120-day buffer for the drug tariff implies that mid-August will be the true pricing date, and the tariff will not disappear with the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The so-called "reversal day" is actually a "stay of execution day." After clearing the book for the first crack, the market will have to face the other two cracks. The simultaneous occurrence of hedge fund long positions replenishment, private equity redemption wave, and pharmaceutical companies' cash flow tightening may make the round of volatility from late April to May even uglier than that in March.
(Source: Bloomberg / Wall Street Journal / CNBC / White House Fact Sheet / STAT News)
4 | NVIDIA Rubin at Full Capacity, Frontline Labs Reschedule Together
NVIDIA announced on Monday that the Vera Rubin platform is now at full capacity, with partners set to begin shipping from the second half of 2026. The new platform consists of 6 chips, including the Vera CPU, Rubin GPU, NVLink 6 switch, ConnectX-9, BlueField-4, and Spectrum-6. NVIDIA claims that the Inference Token cost has dropped by 10 times, the number of GPUs required to train a hybrid expert model has decreased by 4 times, and the performance per watt has increased by 10 times. Jensen Huang pointed out at GTC 2026 that adding Rubin to the Blackwell cumulative orders for 2027 points to $1 trillion.
A press release mentions that Anthropic, Black Forest, Cohere, Cursor, Harvey, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI are all in line to use Rubin. However, Anthropic has also signed a 3.5 GW Google TPU deal, OpenAI's Stargate has been added to the Iran hit list, and Meta is working on in-house MTIA. Frontier Labs continue to appear on the official NVIDIA list while secretly forming a non-NVIDIA mining pool. This "tripolar" performance is much more interesting than the GTC keynote, Huang Renxun's card-selling skills are still intact, but for the first time, the buyer has exercised the card's bargaining power by splitting it with a long-term contract and a blacklist.
(Source: NVIDIA Newsroom / Data Center Knowledge / CNBC / The Information)
Additional Information ↓
Bloomberg reports that the toll for the Hormuz Strait has been requested to be settled in Chinese Yuan, leading to a strengthening of Chinese payment sector stocks. Iran's wartime finance has forcibly turned the sanctions channel into an experiment in de-dollarization. This occurred before the ceasefire negotiations, and the ceasefire does not change this mechanism, adding a wartime precedent beyond the 2025 Sino-Iranian bilateral currency settlement agreement. One of the physical nodes of the dollar's dominance, the strait transit fee, has seen its first non-dollar accounting.
(Source: Bloomberg)
The Financial Times reports that Ukrainian drones have halved Russia's wartime oil windfall. In the past three weeks, intense strikes by the Ukrainian military on Russian refineries and export terminals have caused a one-time shrinkage of the wartime premium on Russian gasoline and diesel exports. Meanwhile, the part of the oil price windfall driven by the Iran conflict has also been reversed following the ceasefire on the evening of April 7. Two oil-rich nations driven by war lost both production capacity and premiums in the same week.
(Source: Financial Times)
OpenAI's Head of Consumer Business, Fidji Simo, has applied for medical leave, leading to a transfer of responsibilities among the product line executives. On the same day, investigations into "The Problem with Sam Altman" by The New Yorker and the leak of 70 pages of internal documents from Eliya continue to ferment in Silicon Valley. Anthropic, with its rising revenue, has overtaken OpenAI, squeezing its narrative space, and internal personnel changes are now emerging. With the commander of the consumer business line absent, it is the perfect time for ChatGPT's story to strike back when most needed.
(Source: CNBC)
The Wall Street Journal reports that private equity fundraising in Q1 has slowed to its lowest pace in 10 years, yet KKR's Peter Stavros says, "This may be our biggest exit year ever." The contrasting speeds of fundraising and exits indicate that GPs are eager to offload inventory to the secondary market and old LPs but lack confidence in bringing new money back in. This marks the second liquidity crack outside of the 13-year fastest hedge fund sell-off, with private equity money being stuck at the entry point and rushed out at the exit.
