If the S&P 500 managed merely to avoid a 1.5% loss during this week’s final session, the benchmark’s weekly streak of wins would run to nine.

Long story short, US equities, considered as a cap-weighted monolith, haven’t had a down week since Donald Trump scrapped tentative plans to seize Kharg Island and commandeer strategic coastal assets in Iran using American ground forces.

A nine-week win streak would be tied for the best in more than 25 years, as illustrated below.

For the month, the S&P’s up 5%, a very solid encore from April’s double-digit gain, which counted as the best since November of 2020 (i.e., since vaccine month).

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this — this win streak for the S&P — is one, albeit not the most important, reason I cheered the abrasive balderdash Trump used to justify his war pivot on March 31.

What mattered at that moment wasn’t whether Trump was “right” to castigate Europe for not participating in his war of aggression (he obviously wasn’t), nor whether he was overstating various cases vis à vis Iran’s capacity to hold out militarily and politically (he obviously was).

Rather, what mattered was that however else history judges the war, this conflict won’t be remembered as another Iraq, let alone another Vietnam.

Of course, wars aren’t necessarily bearish for equities, but given the strategic importance of the contested waterway at the center of the conflict, a protracted engagement which produced a failed state on one side of the world’s most important energy chokepoint would’ve presaged years of rolling supply shocks.

That outcome, or some version of it, may still be on the cards. But Trump’s decision to disengage, or to back away from even deeper engagement, at least reduced the odds of “Iran as Yemen” or “Iran as Libya.”

Around the same time Trump tipped an inclination to wind down major combat operations, Q1 earnings season began. Even accounting for all the relevant caveats, it was a blockbuster. Overall EPS growth was better than 25%, the best since Q4 of 2021. Excluding “other income” from Amazon and Google’s Anthropic stakes, that figure was 18%.

I should emphasize: The median S&P 500 company — i.e., stripping out the fillip from mega-cap tech — grew the bottom line by 14% last quarter. If that were the result for aggregate, cap-weighted index profit growth, it’d still count among the best quarters in half a decade.

What we’ve seen over the last two months is an equity market that over-hedged for a geopolitical worst-case and got caught flat-footed by i) Trump’s pivot and ii) the best ex-2021 earnings season in decades.

Arguably, and while readily conceding you’d be derelict not to take out a little insurance in a scenario where the oil market abruptly experiences the most acute supply shock in history, that’s inexcusable.

How many times have we seen Trump do what he’s just done, which is to say create an existential crisis only to deescalate and kick the proverbial can in pursuit of some grand bargain — some epic “deal” — that everyone knows either isn’t coming or won’t live up to the billing, ultimately resulting in a perpetual stalemate?

Over and over and over again. We’ve seen that dozens of times, on dozens of fronts and through it all, the AI narrative’s served as air cover for dozens and dozens of records.

There’s the chart. It’s updated through May 28. The S&P’s logged 60 new records since Trump took office for the second time.

Just as everyone should’ve seen Trump’s war pivot coming, everyone should’ve known — and, if we’re honest, did know — that US corporate earnings were going to be robust.

We’re in the middle of what the richest, most profitable companies in the history of capitalism are convinced is a technological epoch, and they’re putting their money — hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars on the way to trillions — where their mouths are. Those outlays may prove reckless, or even foolish, but the meantime, all that capex is accruing as revenue “down the line,” so to speak, and it’s juicing the US economy.

“The US is much closer to an overheat than a recession via AI and the OBBBA capex boom,” Nomura’s Charlie McElligott said, referencing the Trump tax bill’s year-one deduction for tangible property.

“Positive earnings revisions are 99%ile since 2000” and America’s status as a net energy exporter means higher fossil fuel prices “can ultimately be pro-cyclical” for US growth, Charlie added, noting that nominal US GDP’s tracking above 7%. Corporates, you’re reminded, operate in the nominal world.

All of the above’s backward-looking, of course. Hindsight’s 20/20, although to my credit: I did tell you so, and repeatedly starting in late-March and continuing pretty much daily thereafter.

Looking forward, a lot can go wrong and, invariably, a lot will go wrong. Stocks do go down on occasion. This rally’s narrow and the expected profit growth driving it heavily depends on just a handful of names, which in turn are plays on a single theme. And valuations are quite rich.

On Wednesday, I mentioned a Goldman composite metric that rolls up valuations, market concentration and recent returns, noting that only twice in history — 2000 and 2021 — was it more overextended than it is currently. The figure above shows you that metric.

Foreboding? Perhaps. Time will tell. Certainly, those are the kinds of extremes that can, but don’t necessarily, cap returns over the near- or even medium-term. More broadly, Trump will re-escalate on some front, somewhere, even if it’s not militarily or in the Mideast.

For now, though, I see nothing wrong with basking in the glow of one of the best weekly streaks for US equities in a quarter century. While keeping one wary eye on The White House, where Trump was busy Friday making a “final determination” on a provisional peace arrangement with Iran.