Remember when everyone was convinced the Iran war would crater the stock market? Yeah, about that.
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq just hit fresh all-time highs this week, and the bears are left wondering what happened to their apocalypse narrative. Turns out, the market’s got a pretty solid playbook for handling geopolitical chaos—and Ryan Detrick, Carson Group’s chief market strategist, just laid it all out.
Here’s the thing: the market only dropped about 8% from pre-war levels at its worst. For a full-blown Middle East conflict, that’s basically the financial equivalent of a minor inconvenience. And Detrick thinks that tells us something important. “It was like the market’s way of saying, potentially, things in the Middle East aren’t going to totally, totally spiral out of control,” he told Business Insider.
The real catalyst? Iran announced the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open” for commercial shipping. Translation: oil supply fears evaporated, and suddenly the bull case looked a lot more attractive.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Detrick’s been bullish the whole time—even when other Wall Street types were doom-scrolling through worst-case scenarios. His secret? A refreshingly simple framework: “It’s not about good or bad, it’s about better or worse.” The market doesn’t need perfect conditions to rally. It just needs to adapt to whatever situation it’s facing and find the path of least resistance.
Think about it. The market’s been through wars, pandemics, recessions, and crypto meltdowns. It’s basically the financial equivalent of a cockroach—incredibly hard to kill and weirdly good at finding opportunities in chaos.
Now comes the fun part. Detrick expects earnings season to deliver the “one-two punch” that keeps this bull market rolling. De-escalation in the Middle East? Check. Strong corporate earnings? Coming soon. That combination is exactly what the market needs to justify climbing even higher.
“We do think that this bull market is not over yet, and we think it’s going to be justified again this earnings season,” Detrick said. “It’s a global bull market, and I don’t want to fight that.”
The key insight here isn’t rocket science, but it’s worth remembering: markets are forward-looking machines. They don’t care about yesterday’s headlines—they care about tomorrow’s earnings reports and whether the geopolitical temperature is cooling down. Right now, both boxes are getting checked.
So while the headlines were screaming about Middle East tensions, the smart money was quietly positioning for exactly what we’re seeing now: a relief rally powered by de-escalation and the expectation of solid corporate results. The bears fumbled the ball, and the bulls are back in control.
