№ 025WeeklyApr 30 20266 min read

EquitiesMacro

Micro Takes the Wheel

The war got worse. Oil hit $126. The S&P rallied 12%. Earnings season changed the subject.

By Akram Ayyash

The Signal

The S&P 500 rallied from 6,316 on March 30 to 7,136 on April 29, a 12.4% move in one month, while Brent crude touched $126. The macro backdrop has not improved. The Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed. The Fed held rates at 3.50-3.75% with its most divided vote since 1992. But 84% of S&P 500 companies beat earnings estimates, aggregate EPS came in 12.3% above consensus, and Kevin Warsh cleared the Senate Banking Committee 13-11 on his way to replacing Jerome Powell. Bitcoin rose to $76,000 as spot ETFs pulled in $2.4 billion in April, the strongest inflow month of the year. For the first time since the Iran conflict began, single names are driving the tape. The macro is still loud. The market stopped listening.

The last five recaps have been some version of the same story. Oil went up. Everything else went down or sideways. Correlations spiked. Nothing hedged. I wrote in When Everything Became One Trade that the market's architecture had revealed itself. In Nothing Is Working the Way It Should, the title said it plainly.

Something shifted in April. Not the macro. The macro got worse. Brent touched $126 on April 30, its wartime high. Iran rejected a deal to reopen Hormuz, the U.S. expanded its blockade, and traffic through the strait is running at roughly 5% of pre-war levels. The Fed held rates steady and signaled no intention of cutting. Oil and rates, the twin drivers of everything since February, are both still elevated.

But the S&P 500 is up 12.4% from its March bottom. The Nasdaq hit new records. The VIX settled from 31 back to 19.

What changed is not the backdrop. What changed is what the market decided to pay attention to.

Earnings Took the Tape

Earnings season arrived and it was not close. Eighty-four percent of S&P 500 reporters beat EPS estimates. Aggregate earnings came in 12.3% above consensus, per FactSet's April 24 update. The numbers were broad-based, but the headline acts were big tech.

Alphabet: $109.9 billion in revenue, Google Cloud up 63% to $20 billion. Microsoft: $82.9 billion, AI revenue $37 billion, up 123% year-over-year. Amazon: $181.5 billion, AWS beating estimates at $37.6 billion. Apple's fiscal Q1 came in at $143.8 billion, a record, with iPhone revenue up 23%.

These are not macro stories. These are company-level stories. Revenue growing because specific products are working, not because rates moved or oil settled at a favorable level. The stocks reacted accordingly. Alphabet up 6% after hours, Meta down 5% on flat guidance. Individual names, individual reactions.

The financials told a similar story earlier in the month. JPMorgan posted record markets revenue of $11.6 billion with investment banking fees up 28%. Goldman reported its highest-ever equities revenue at $5.33 billion, up 27%. The Wall Street earnings complex is not responding to Hormuz. It is responding to deal flow, trading volumes, and client activity.

For weeks, the tape was a single variable: oil, and what oil meant for rates. Now it is what companies actually earned. That is the regime shift.

Powell's Last Stand

Jerome Powell chaired his final FOMC meeting on April 29. The committee held rates at 3.50-3.75%. The vote was 8-4. Four dissenters wanted a 25 basis point cut. That is the most dissent at a Fed meeting since October 1992.

Warsh cleared the Senate Banking Committee the same day. The full Senate vote is expected as early as May 11. Powell's term expires May 15.

Warsh has been explicit. He has argued there is room to cut rates without stoking inflation, partly because AI-driven productivity gains are suppressing costs in ways the current models do not capture. Whether he can deliver on that with Brent above $100 is an open question. But the market is pricing in the transition, and the transition implies a more accommodative posture than what Powell just delivered.

In my view, that is why the equity rally has been so sharp despite the macro. Markets are not ignoring oil and rates. They are looking through them to a Fed chair who has already said he wants to cut, inheriting a committee where four members just voted to do exactly that.

Bitcoin Follows the Risk Switch

Bitcoin rallied from roughly $66,000 at the end of March to $76,000 by April 30. A 15% move. Spot ETF inflows hit $2.4 billion in April, nearly double March's $1.32 billion and the strongest month of 2026. BlackRock's IBIT captured over 70% of flows. Total spot ETF AUM crossed $102 billion.

The rally is real. But it is not a decoupling story. The 30-day BTC-S&P correlation climbed back toward 0.94 in April. Bitcoin rallied because equities rallied. The same institutional liquidity pool is driving both.

That is not a criticism. It is a description. In March, the observation was that Bitcoin had not decoupled from equities during the selloff. In April, the same linkage worked in the other direction. A $2.4 billion month of ETF inflows says institutional allocators are treating BTC as part of the risk portfolio, and when the portfolio is bid, BTC is bid with it.

The Fear and Greed index climbed from 8 in early April to 39 by month-end. Stablecoin supply hit a record $322 billion. Capital is not leaving crypto. It is rotating within it, from alts back to BTC, and from the sidelines into ETFs, in line with the broader risk-on shift.

Tidbits

CLARITY Act markup pushed to May. Senator Tillis resolved his stablecoin yield objections, and Senator Lummis announced plans to mark up the bill in May. The legislative window is narrowing. Lummis warned that failure to act this year likely means waiting until 2030. Galaxy Digital puts passage odds at roughly 50-50.

Anthropic valued at $350 billion. Google announced up to $40 billion in investment on April 24, anchored by a $10 billion initial commitment. Anthropic's revenue has reportedly surpassed OpenAI's. An IPO is expected as early as October, targeting a $60 billion raise. OpenAI's CFO said the company is "not ready" to go public this year.

Tokenized RWA market approaching $29 billion. Up nearly 20x in three years. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries alone sit near $14 billion, with BlackRock's BUIDL at $2.5 billion and growing. The IMF published a note on April 2 calling tokenization a "fundamental reconfiguration of financial architecture". When the IMF writes that sentence, the pilot phase is over.

Ethereum Foundation staking 70,000 ETH. The Foundation committed $143 million to staking, generating an estimated $3.9-5.4 million annually. BlackRock launched ETHB on March 12, staking 70-95% of holdings via Coinbase Prime. The shift from periodic ETH sales to staking yield is a quiet change in how the Foundation funds operations.

What I'm Watching

Warsh Senate floor vote (May 11). Powell's term expires May 15. The transition itself is priced in. The first policy signals from a confirmed Warsh will set the tone for the second half of the year.

CLARITY Act markup (May). The bill's chances are binary: it moves before the August recess or it dies until the next Congress. The stablecoin dispute is resolved. The question now is calendar politics.

Dispersion after earnings. Earnings season is proving that single-name selection matters again. The test is whether that persists after reporting season ends, or whether the macro reasserts itself as the driver.

BTC above $80,000. The April rally was strong but $80K has not been tested. A move above it on volume would confirm the risk-on rotation into crypto. A rejection keeps the range-bound question open.

Drop me a line:

What do you think? Do you like this? Do you not like this? I would love to hear your thoughts, so please reach me at akram@span.blog

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