By now, a lot (most?) readers are probably tired of hearing about equities’ purportedly uncanny knack for ignoring existential geopolitical tension.

Dare I belabor the point further and chance the ire of rally skeptics who spent the better part of the last two months on the sidelines?

I dare say “yes.” Yes, I’ll brave belaboring the point, if only to highlight a chart some of you have likely run across already this week.

The figure above’s from Deutsche Bank’s Henry Allen, and it puts the surge from the Iran war lows in historical context. Simply put: This is, on one vector anyway, history’s most anomalous rally.

There are precious few post-War examples of the S&P rising this rapidly over such a short time frame, where “precious few” means just four. Three of those episodes occurred during recession recoveries. The other a few months before Black Monday.

Allen offered some foreboding commentary. “Despite the catalysts driving today’s advance (e.g., AI excitement, strong data), the speed of the rally is now bucking all recent precedents for an economy that isn’t emerging from recession,” he said, cautioning that “we’re still in an environment of heightened geopolitical risk, and markets are now pricing in a Fed hike as more-likely-than-not for 2026 as well.”

That latter point — about the prospects for Fed tightening — is particularly concerning, Allen suggested. “Fed hawkishness has been correlated with several multi-asset selloffs of recent years, including 2015-16, late-2018, and 2022,” he said.

And yet, it’s important to consider the fundamentals. I’ve been on (and on) about Q1 earnings season, when S&P 500 companies collectively grew the bottom line by more than 25%, the strongest since 2021 (and in decades if you exclude that year).

I’ve also been keen to emphasize that it’s not “just Anthropic paper gains,” nor is it “just mega-cap tech.” S&P 500 earnings growth in Q1 2026 was 18% excluding the Anthropic write-up at Amazon and Alphabet, and the median company grew the bottom line by 14%.

If you’re still unconvinced, have a look at the figure below, which uses the latest BEA data to give you the broadest possible picture of margins across businesses in the US.

First note that we remain in a historic profit bonanza. Even at the local lows, margins were still far higher than any pre-2020s quarter.

Moreover, Q1’s 15.6% marked a re-acceleration and counted as the highest since Q4 of 2024.

The blue line in the figure shows you corporates’ interest burden as a share of profits. Long story short: That share’s never been lower. The fundamentals, as they say, are sound.

And yet, it does feel tenuous. The rally, I mean. As Allen’s colleague Jim Reid remarked on Wednesday, a 10th consecutive advance for the S&P this week would be the longest weekly run since 1985.