OPEC Adds Oil | Saudi Cuts Back | EU Tax Debate

 It feels lighter, but not settled. Relief is showing, but staying cautious.

S&P 500 futures ticked up about into the open. Nasdaq-100 futures gained 0.3%, while Dow futures slipped.

Ceasefire talks pulled oil slightly lower early in the session. Oil is down slightly, helping risk find a bid to open the week. That is giving tech early room to lead. But the move is measured, not aggressive.

Yields and macro uncertainty are still in the background. Positioning is staying balanced rather than leaning in. Money is rotating toward growth, but conviction is still thin.

Investor Signal

The market is still trading one hinge. Geopolitics sets the tone, oil confirms it, yields shape the follow-through. When those align, moves extend. When they diverge, momentum fades before it builds.

Donald Trump is preparing a move that could reshape global power — and spark massive gains for early investors.

Former CIA analyst Dr. Mark Skousen warns Trump’s hardline stance on China and Russia could ignite a global fight over critical minerals used in AI chips, EVs, and U.S. weapons systems.

When the government quietly took stakes in similar companies, stocks surged 200%–300%+ in weeks.

Now Skousen says the NEXT target is a tiny $5 American company — already backed by Tesla and $130M+ in U.S. grants.

Skousen just bought 10,000 shares himself.

See his urgent briefing and the stock name here.

Over the weekend, OPEC voted to increase oil production by 206,000 barrels per day starting in May. Sounds like good news. It isn't.

The Strait of Hormuz has been closed since the Iran war started five weeks ago. That's the narrow waterway that most Middle Eastern oil passes through to reach the world. The countries that voted to produce more oil simply cannot ship it out. The vote is a statement. Not a supply event.

Here's what the vote doesn't fix:

The entire oil market is sitting on one assumption right now. That the strait reopens soon. This vote just confirmed how much weight that single assumption is carrying.

The Reality 

OPEC raised quotas it cannot deliver. The oil price answers to one thing only. When Hormuz reopens. Nobody controls that timeline.

The confidential financial details behind the two biggest AI companies are leaking out ahead of their IPOs. The numbers are striking.

OpenAI expects to burn $85 billion in 2028 alone. That's after nearly doubling revenue. It doesn't expect to break even until the 2030s. Anthropic gets there sooner but tells the same story. Computing costs are eating revenue faster than revenue can grow.

Both companies report two versions of their finances. One includes the cost of training AI models. One doesn't. The version that includes training costs is deeply negative for years. Private investors accepted that. Public market investors won't be as patient.

The Clock 

Going public doesn't end the spending race. It just starts a countdown. The question is how long public markets will fund losses at this scale before demanding a path to profit that the compute arms race may not allow.

Former Presidential Advisor, Jim Rickards says, “Trump’s crowning achievement will be much, much bigger.”

In the months ahead, he predicts, the government will release a massive multi-trillion-dollar asset which it has held back for more than a century. And this will give ordinary investors a chance to strike it rich.

Click here to see the full details.

Saudi Arabia has been running an ambitious national transformation plan for the past decade called Vision 2030. The goal was simple. Build a new economy beyond oil. Futuristic cities, luxury tourism, global investment. The centerpiece was a project called The Line, a 170-kilometre city being built in the desert.

Almost all of it is now under review. The war has already cost Saudi Arabia more than $10 billion in lost revenue. The country's sovereign wealth fund quietly sold most of its U.S. stock holdings before the war even began. The pullback from these projects had already started. The war accelerated what was already happening.

Here's what makes it worse:

The scenario Saudi officials fear most is a wounded Iran that still holds the keys to the strait. That's not a resolution. That's a new kind of stalemate.

The Reckoning 

Vision 2030 was already running short on funding. The war removed whatever runway was left. A decade of bold planning is being repriced against a reality nobody built for.

While the oil shock is hurting European households and factories, energy companies are posting record profits. Five EU countries decided this weekend that gap is politically unsustainable.

Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Austria sent a joint letter to the European Commission on Friday. They want a windfall tax on energy company profits. European gas prices are up more than 70% since the war began. The same dynamic lifting U.S. energy stocks is hitting European consumers hard. Politicians are hearing about it daily.

This is the same playbook Europe used in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. The logic hasn't changed. Companies profiting from war-driven shock should help fund relief for people absorbing the cost. The tax doesn't exist yet. The political pressure behind it is real and growing fast.

The Brussels Signal

The war is generating tax responses that will outlast the fighting. Energy companies winning from this shock should be watching Brussels very closely right now.

According to a veteran trader who’s spent years studying repeatable market behavior, retail traders often do far more work than necessary — and still miss the same daily opportunity. 

He says a specific pattern tends to form within a short, consistent window each trading day. When spotted early, it allows trades to be planned calmly — before emotion, headlines, and intraday noise take over.

He’s now breaking it down step-by-step in a free online web class, explaining why this setup keeps appearing and why even beginners are able to follow it once they know what to look for.

See the full breakdown before the next trading day.

This one snuck up on almost everyone. U.S. plastics companies are having a standout year and the Iran war is the reason.

Dow's stock is up 77% in 2026. LyondellBasell is up 84%. 

The reason is straightforward. Middle Eastern chemical producers cut output when the war started. Asian and European competitors lost access to Gulf crude. U.S. companies use domestic natural gas, which barely moved in price. They have a significant cost advantage and are running at full capacity for the rest of the year.

Here's the part that makes this more than a short-term trade:

The Edge 

That window stays open well after any peace deal is signed. The advantage doesn't disappear when the war ends.The war didn't build this position. It revealed it. 

U.S. plastics companies were already sitting in the right place. The shock just made the scoreboard visible.

Five weeks in and the pattern is clear. The war didn't create winners from scratch. It revealed which positions were already built correctly. 

OPEC voted and the oil price shrugged. OpenAI and Anthropic sprint toward public markets while burning money at historic scale. Saudi Arabia watches a decade of plans come apart. Europe moves to tax the companies profiting from a shock its citizens are absorbing. And U.S. plastics runs at full capacity while competitors wait for a strait to reopen. 

The scoreboard was always there. The war just turned the lights on.