With the (hardly insignificant) caveat that as long as margins remain elevated and corporates sustain double-digit profit growth, there’s little reason for equity prices to sweat something as trivial as freedom of navigation through the world’s most important maritime energy chokepoint, the juxtaposition between aggressive investor positioning and the fraught nature of international relations still feels tenuous on some days.

That’s not exactly a novel observation, but… well, suffice to say I overdosed this week on audio articles from Foreign Affairs, which serve as the acoustic backdrop for my increasingly elaborate evening meal prep sessions.

The world’s a messy, messy place, and although it’s a fool who lets the prevalence of geopolitical friction take precedence over booming corporate profits and booming growth while making investment decisions — particularly considering that cross-Strait tensions are nothing new, either in the Mideast or in the Pacific — there’s a fine line between overstating the significance of the juxtapositional anomaly one can conjure by plotting equity benchmarks with inverted measures of geopolitical uncertainty, and declaring the discrepancy meaningless.

With the above in mind, it’s worth noting that US-focused equity funds took in nearly $120 billion on net over the latest weekly reporting period, according to EPFR. That’s (obviously) a record, and it pushed the YTD inflow to US stocks beyond $341 billion.

The figure on the left, below, from BofA’s Michael Hartnett, gives you some context for 2026’s pace. We’re annualizing nearly $750 billion.

The figure on the right provides the same context for tech inflows, which is to say it gives you a sense of how 2026 will compare versus history assuming the YTD pace continues.

Last week alone, tech-focused equity funds took in more than $19 billion. Note that inflows weren’t confined to large-caps. Both US mid-caps and small-caps saw record weekly inflows.

I can only assume the impetus was the Iran MOU, which brings us quickly full circle. JD Vance did ultimately go to Bürgenstock for peace talks, but Donald Trump, who spent last week irritable with Benjamin Netanyahu for the IDF’s conduct in Lebanon, turned his ire back on the IRGC.

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid proxies in Lebanon from causing trouble,” he said. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”