By Hamza Shaban

This is The Takeaway from today's Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:

• What we're watching

• What we're reading

• Economic data releases and earnings

In normal times it's hard to know who to believe. The stock market tends to go up in the long run, but its gyrations and rhythms on shorter time scales are a mystery, even to the podcasters and YouTubing chart analysts who say otherwise.

Wartime complicates everything, and the ripples of expensive oil mean that every headline has the power to whipsaw the market.

Read more: How oil price shocks ripple through your wallet, from gas to groceries

An eager market has proven itself primed to turn on every new detail from the White House, even as investors and analysts remain skeptical of what President Trump says and the administration's timelines for a conclusion.

Even people outside the finance world are familiar with the TACO ("Trump Always Chickens Out") trade, where Trump boldly proclaims something only to back down. (Though it sounds pejorative, the phrase has been co-opted by apolitical Wall Street analysts as a trading framework.) The market has tried to get ahead of all of that by pricing in the president's anticipated reversal.

But in the Iran war, Tehran has a vote too.

This is perhaps one of the strangest things in the current environment: A key source of market-moving information — Iran itself — is also the US adversary. It takes two to tango, and two to open the Strait of Hormuz. Thanks to social media, we can now read their metaphorical newspaper from here, propaganda or fact, to get a sense of their willingness to do so.

On Wednesday, the Iranian president even published a message to the American people, defending its position directly.

Recently, Iran's parliament speaker, Mohammad Ghalibaf, has been getting in on the stock action, using his X account to dole out investment advice and counter Washington's efforts to steer market sentiment. It's a new kind of geopolitical trolling and social media warfare that's also inflected with finance influencer lingo.

"Out-of-context quotes + manufactured FOMO = War profiteering 101. Do Your Own Research," Ghalibaf wrote in a post Wednesday.

We wrote this week that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may have lost his juice to will tech stocks higher. But maybe with the Iran campaign and the Fed's new challenges, the field is just too crowded to command attention.

President Donald Trump speaks with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during a roundtable discussion on public safety at a Tennessee Air National Guard Base, Monday, March 23, 2026, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)