Did you listen to Bill Ackman?

Did you “ignore the bears” on the way to buying the dip in “the highest quality businesses in the world,” which early this week were “trading at extremely cheap prices”?

I hope so. Because gee golly did shares of those “quality businesses” rally on Tuesday after Donald Trump and, later, Tehran’s puppet president Masoud Pezeshkian signaled a possible end to open military hostilities between the US and Iran.

Iran, Pezeshkian told Brussels, has “the necessary will to end this war” in the event the country receives “guarantees” that the US and Israel won’t attack again. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, he reiterated, is only throttled because of those nations’ “hostile and aggressive actions.”

Pezeshkian’s remarks to an EU official came hours after Trump suggested the US may let the international community, and particularly the European powers, sort out safe transit through the Strait. That, as opposed to forcing the issue by landing American ground troops on Iranian soil.

As the figure shows, the S&P notched its best session in nearly a year, a 3% barnburner that accelerated into the close, indicative of mechanical flows, quarter-end dynamics and, possibly, the beginnings of a panic grab for upside exposure to hedge a war deescalation scenario (the left-for-dead right-tail).

This — the equity rebound — could be over before it starts. All it’ll take to snuff out the nascent rally is one irritable Trump “truth.” While US equities were exploding to the upside late Tuesday, he was reposting a video of US warplanes bombing something — an ammunition depot maybe, judging by secondary explosions — in Isfahan.

The self-congratulatory snark I employed here at the outset (I did say Bill was likely right) isn’t the key takeaway on Tuesday. Rather, the key point is that Iran isn’t “dug in” and would rather this be over.

Contrary to the characterization favored by US war hawks, the Islamic Republic, for all its villainy, is a country, not a terrorist outfit. They don’t want to be invaded. The idea here isn’t “Let’s draw ’em in and look forward to two decades of asymmetric warfare.”

And all sectarian animosity aside, Iran would rather not be “forced” to blow up the Sunni states’ desalination plants. Again, this is a government we’re talking about, not a militia.

Abbas Araghchi gave an interview with Al Jazeera on Tuesday. The very fact that he’s still alive to give interviews is proof positive that Trump asked the Israelis to hold off on assassinating anybody else. Because trust me: If it were up to Israel, he’d be a corpse.

As The New York Times noted, the IDF’s decapitation strategy (that’d be the same strategy which the same Times and other US media outlets have derided as ineffectual) has succeeded to such a degree that “Iranian negotiators may not know what their government is willing to concede in any negotiations.”

In other words: It’s unclear who’s in charge, and if you kill Araghchi and Bagher Ghalibaf, you run the very real risk of having no one to talk to. Or, more to the point, no one to talk to with enough cachet to guarantee that any deal which does come together is enforceable domestically.

It’s that dire from a personnel perspective. Sure, there are plenty of bodies to fill seats. It’s a question of whether the names attached to those bodies mean anything to anybody internally. If they don’t — if the replacements have no clout — it’s a problem.

In his remarks to Al Jazeera, Araghchi said that so far, there are no proper “negotiations,” only message-passing with Steve Witkoff mediated by “friends,” which means Egypt, Oman and Pakistan.

Araghchi claimed that Iran has a “defined” intergovernmental structure for assessing the merits of Witkoff’s messages. It’s all being overseen by the National Security Council, he said.

Technically, that panel’s chaired by Pezeshkian, but that’s a joke. The real power there now belongs to Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who replaced the late Ali Larijani in the top security role last week. As discussed here, Zolghadr’s IRGC resume is (more than) passable, but he’s not exactly a regime all-star.

Suffice to say this is a suboptimal situation for Iran. If you know regime propaganda, you know they like to create ridiculously sentimental images of the legends convening for strategy meetings, or sometimes just hanging on a grassy knoll.

Some of those images are real, but some aren’t, and even before AI, Iran was adept at creating photorealistic depictions of, for example, Qassem Soleimani, Hassan Nasrallah and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis standing over a giant map and gaming out regional conquest.

Bagher Zolghadr and Masoud Pezeshkian huddled over a poorly-written message from Witkoff and Jared Kushner (think: “Stop war? Check box ‘yes’ or ‘no'”) is the furthest thing from that exalted propaganda.

According to Araghchi, Iran hasn’t responded to Witkoff and Kushner just yet, and no decisions have been made regarding direct negotiations. Iran’s conditions for peace, Araghchi emphasized, are “clear.” Here are those conditions:

• The cessation of US and Israeli attacks
• The end of the war on all fronts, presumably including Lebanon
• A promise that US and Israel won’t resume attacking Iran at some point later
• Hard currency reparations
• International recognition of Tehran’s right to “exercise authority” over the Strait of Hormuz

Setting aside the reparations demand (which could be folded into some sort of energy cooperation that no one need know about), the only one of those conditions that seems out of reach is the cessation of hostilities against Hezbollah in Lebanon. If anything’s beyond Trump’s ability to deliver, it’s that.

The rest of it… well, let me put it this way: If you’re negotiating in bad faith, which Trump always is, then why not just agree?

In other words, if your word’s no good, but the other side’s willing to accept it even knowing it’s no good, then what’s the downside to giving it?

While speaking to reporters at The White House late Tuesday, Trump confirmed the US will leave Iran “within two weeks, maybe three.” Asked about the Strait, Trump said, “We’re not going to have anything to do with [it].”

“These countries [like] China will go up, and they’ll fuel up, and they’ll leave and they’ll take care of themselves,” he went on. “There’s no reason for us to do it.”