Why Markets Are Resilient | Macro Mondays: April 6, 2026

0:00Andreas Steno Larsen:New week.

0:04Big moves. You ready?

0:09Andreas Steno Larsen:Andreas on the data, Mikkel on the flow. Turn the headline into trades you can know. From yields to inflation, every chart, every trend. Get the story, get the setup from the open to the end. They try to be as actionable and as honest as possible But keep in mind that their predictions might be Sometimes may be good

0:35Mikkel Rosenvold:Sometimes may be shit Sometimes may be shit

0:46Andreas Steno Larsen:It's Macro Mondays, big picture Clear plays, stocks, bonds FX, crypto on the way Get context with strategy right now on your screen. Macro Mondays, level up your week, oh yeah.

1:05Mikkel Rosenvold:Hello out there, welcome to Real Vision, welcome to Macro Mondays. We're sending you to you right on the back of the Easter holidays here. And as you can see, Andreas is with me as usual, not from the usual Copenhagen office. Andreas, you've set up new office to the south of Europe. It looks really, really nice where you're at, although you're wearing the same shirt that you would have been in Copenhagen. But where are you? How are things addressed? Let's start there.

1:34Andreas Steno Larsen:Well, I'm currently monitoring the situation in Greece. So the reason why I'm looking for the site here, because we actually have the American base just to the right of me. And it's not like we're trying to emulate Citrini Research, actually brought boots on the ground in the region. That was really cool, by the way. Yeah, really good work by them. But yeah, I'm watching the American base here, and as per usual, we Europeans, we're not willing to sacrifice anything at all. We're just chilling while everything is unfolding.

2:08Mikkel Rosenvold:It looks that way, Andreas. It looks wonderful. You're in Sonic Freed. Yeah. Apparently for work, not holidays. You're monitoring the situation in real life, So you'll probably be able to write off the plane tickets. We'll have to look into that. But anyway, very, very glad you could join us here. We hope the connection sticks. As I understand, you're on a mobile connection, not the Wi-Fi. That's typical for Southern Europe, that the 5G connection is often much better than the actual broadband connections. But anyway, let's hope it sticks for the show. We have a lot to talk about. Tomorrow is Power Plant Day and Bridge Day.

2:47Mikkel Rosenvold:Apparently, we'll dive much more into that. We'll take a closer look at some of your and our takes, Andreas, on the situation in the strait and the war, and if we can, in any meaningful way, pull those two apart and look at it. We'll get back to that, Andreas. We have a great week for you as well on Real Vision. Tomorrow at 11 a.m., we have Roland Julien's Ask Me Anything was supposed to be last week. It's going to be tomorrow at 11 a.m. Eastern. That's for pro members. for our WeConnect members. We have the Connect portfolio update by Joe Bland coming up on Thursday. And obviously we have addressed my three usual flagship reports.

3:24Mikkel Rosenvold:The standard signals should be out momentarily later today. I'm releasing the drill on Wednesday, looking obviously at the situation in Iran, the aftermath of the expected power plant and bridge day, and potentially also looking into some of the more interesting developing stories out of the political landscape of Europe, both Hungary, Germany, etc. And then obviously we have our portfolio update on Friday, where we wrap everything up and tell you what we do in our portfolio. Now, remember, and Andres, I almost feel bad for posting or for playing our usual disclaimer, because things haven't been too good for Gennaro Gattuso, our good friend.

4:01Mikkel Rosenvold:But anyway, remember that we try to be as actionable and tradable as possible, but our suggestions might be...

4:09Andreas Steno Larsen:Sometimes it may be good, sometimes it may be shit.

4:15Mikkel Rosenvold:there we go sometimes maybe good sometimes maybe shit things have been very very shit for Giannata Gattuso in these past weeks Italy obviously missed the World Cup this summer in the US we are on two address I'm working on pitches on why we should boycott the World Cup now that we are out of it I don't think we have any sneaky way of getting into it I think maybe Italy could have some sneaky way into it I think Giorgio Malone is in a much better position for that than we are unless we give up Greenland maybe but let's not hope for that. Andres, before we get to Power Plant Day, I just want to show you another truth by Donald Trump, which I actually really, really like here.

4:54Mikkel Rosenvold:I want to get your take on the bad and very boring singer Bruce Springsteen. I don't know if you saw this truth, but this was, in my opinion, back to peak troll Trump. In the midst of a complete energy crisis, a major one in the Middle East. Donald Trump writes a complete rant on a singer, Bruce Springsteen. He's obviously a big name. He's obviously suffering from TDS, apparently. But this is top-level trolling, in my opinion, Adres. A dried-up prune suffering from a really bad plastic surgeon. I'm picking up a lot of very, very good phrases here. I don't know. What's your opinion of Bruce Springsteen, Adres?

5:35Andreas Steno Larsen:So I wasn't prepared for that question, But the worst festival experience I've ever had included Bruce Springsteen. The Buskiller Festival, the biggest festival in Northern Europe, booked Bruce Springsteen probably 10 years ago by now. And they spent all of their budget on Bruce Springsteen. So it was a crappy, crappy, crappy lineup outside of Bruce Springsteen. And I don't like Bruce Springsteen either. So he ruined my latest Buskiller Festival. So I'm actually on Trump's team here.

6:06Mikkel Rosenvold:it's interesting in Denmark it's it's sort of a rite of passage for for center-left politicians they must like Bruce Springsteen or else they're not accepted into government that is that is what it's like they they have to attend at least one concert so there are some political angles to this but anyway Andreas this was just to to point out that sometime Donald Trump posts something that we like and we'll we will we will praise him for that because this was top level trolling in my opinion. But Andres, let's get to it. Yesterday we had this apparently new deadline. Some people thought of it. We always knew it was Tuesday, that Tuesday was going to be the power plane day, the bridge day.

6:43Mikkel Rosenvold:This was made even more specific, 8 p.m. That's probably where people should head to the shelters in Iran if a deal isn't made. And obviously it's building on this very, very controversial tweet by Donald Trump that Tuesday will be power plant day, bridge day, all wrapped up in one in Iran. So essentially, Donald Trump is losing patience with negotiations. He's trying to amp up the pressure, as we've seen before, maximize the leverage. And we are seeing reportedly some very, very frantic attempts at ironing out a ceasefire before this. I think it's quite possible that we will see something, or at least enough to maybe push the deadline one more day, one more time.

7:23Mikkel Rosenvold:People keep telling me that, ah, this time he cannot push the deadline again. I'm like, why not? This is the 180 guy. I'm sure we can get there. So on one hand, Andreas, we have this culmination point that we're talking about. It's getting clearer. It's getting nearer. I've talked about, you mentioned the U.S. aircraft carrier in Crete. It took a detour to Croatia. I was heading back to the Gulf, apparently. A little bit to my surprise. The U.S. is building up forces for a culmination, for an escalation, and it might happen. The big question is, Andreas, does this even matter for markets?

8:03Andreas Steno Larsen:I don't think we're at the point where it doesn't matter. But interestingly, we've seen pretty decent price action maybe a week in a row now. We had a much better end to last week than we've had in prior weeks. I've also noted how we've seen momentum behind a lot of bilateral deals, actually, not even involving the US. The biggest one came over the weekend with the agreement between Iran and Iraq on oil flows, which is a major deal. Let me just try and give you a sneak peek into what that deal entails. We can get the chat up here. Yeah. First of all, I wrote a very contrarian story on Friday, and I published parts of it on X and LinkedIn as well to see the kind of feedback I would get.

8:59Andreas Steno Larsen:And it's probably the most contrarian take written on oil at all this year by anyone. And my inbox has been absolutely on fire since I released this one. I mean, as I tweeted, let the insults begin. And I've had so many insults that I've stopped counting them. The interesting thing here is that it's the kind of setup that reminds me a lot about what happened in, say, for example, silver in January of this year, where, you know, if you tried to tell people that silver wouldn't go off in a straight line, everyone would call you an idiot. It's the exact same thing happening now. If you try to tell people that there's actually a path towards a more balanced oil market, everyone tells you you're a moron.

9:47Andreas Steno Larsen:So let's try and have a look at the numbers here, because I actually don't think the oil map looks that bad.

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10:11Andreas Steno Larsen:In a matter of a month, roughly since the war began, we managed to bypass the strain of Hormuz in roughly two thirds of the cases. So two thirds of the flow that left Hormuz, we now get those flows from elsewhere. Either by pipelines, via storage releases. there are several ways to mitigate this issue, meaning that out of the 20 million barrels that left the Strait of the Moose on a daily basis before the war, we probably only need to replace, say, a handful of those, maybe 6 million barrels a day now to get back to where we were. I know some of these solutions are pretty short-term, but anyway, this deal between Iran and Iraq accounts for roughly 3.5 million barrels a day.

11:04So, I mean, we're even

11:06Andreas Steno Larsen:ahead of that very, very, very optimistic schedule that I released on Friday. And that makes me pretty upbeat on behalf of markets, even though there is a pretty decent potential for a clusterfuck in the region. So, pardon my French, but it looks like that risk is on the rise, right? So, it's been amazing to follow over the weekend, the amount of momentum behind these bilateral deals. I mean, it's also pretty obvious now that Europe is talking directly to Iran on some of these shipments. So what do you make of that? I mean, it also makes it pretty clear that the US-EU

11:49Andreas Steno Larsen:hostilities, they're on the rise as well. I mean, it seems like the relationship between Europe and the U.S. is as bad as it's ever been, more or less. Sorry, that's probably overstating it, but it is bad. No, no, absolutely.

12:03Mikkel Rosenvold:Absolutely. It's horrible. As I discussed with Michael Papich, I encourage people to go see that show if you're a Real Vision subscriber last week. I think even if we get past this, even though Donald Trump didn't pull the U.S. out of NATO last week, it's more or less already done. I mean, the security guarantees have been put into question And the big underlying problem is that for the US, the main enemy is China. For Europe, the main enemy is Russia. And it's very, very hard to maintain such a dominant alliance if you disagreeing who the main target is. So I agree with you on the US-European relationship.

12:39Mikkel Rosenvold:Now, it's very, very hard currently for Europe to navigate the flow of messaging out of the White House. Because last week we were told, go get your own oil. which makes a lot of sense. The messaging was the US doesn't really care about the Strait of Hormuz. Go get your own oil. That's what we're doing. A French tanker called the CMA CGM Creepy passed a strait this weekend under some kind of deal with the Iranians. Is that doing deals with the devil? Yes, sure. But we were told to go get our own oil. There are two ways to do that. Either you force your way through militarily or you pay up. That's the way we get our oil.

13:17Mikkel Rosenvold:So that is one of the solutions. And after Cedra, I'm probably even more upbeat than you on this because what I'm seeing is that we've had elevated oil prices for four to five weeks now. When you have oil prices above$100 for four to five weeks, people begin to get really, really, really creative. And that's what we're seeing. Every little bit of oil, every drop of oil that can be squeezed out somewhere in the system is getting squeezed out. and it doesn't take too much to get back into manageable levels. You have the Iran-Iraq deal. That's going to be slow to ramp up, so we're not going to maybe see those 3.4 million barrels right away, but it's getting there.

13:59Mikkel Rosenvold:You have some Omani ships having taken a different route closer to the Omani shore. That's probably not going to be able to take the big tankers. Again, this is very, very, very, very slow, but maybe, Andreas, maybe the rate of change is what matters. We are seeing more and more ships. There's no way around that. We're seeing more and more ships, 21 ships this weekend on April 1st. One of the biggest days, we had 16 ships pass through. That's only 10, 15 % of what we're used to, but it's better than nothing. And if it's improving, if the rate of change is improving, sometimes that's what matters for stock markets.

14:33Mikkel Rosenvold:And I want to bring up this chart briefly that you also posted in your Steno Signals on the stock market bottom during the COVID crisis. what's the analogy here Andres or the comparison

14:45Andreas Steno Larsen:I actually think there are two important analogies one is what you rightfully labelled the Fauci syndrome I mean a lot of the pundits very invested in this doomsday story about scancities in energy space etc they'll have a hard time pivoting because first of all they've invested themselves more or less in this narrative that will run out of fuel. And on top of it, it also seems like it's the one that sells the most tickets at the moment, if you know what I mean. It was also the case for Fauci. It was very difficult for him to pivot because he got a lot of airtime out of his doom port. It was the same with Viroly, just all over the globe, basically.

15:30Andreas Steno Larsen:So I actually think there was a comparison there. It makes it a lot more difficult to pivot when you've told people that it's the end of the world. as a lot of the energy pundits have told us around oil here. Having said that, I remember very clearly this spring of 2020 and how difficult it was to convince anyone of this rate of change story and the impact on markets. It was also the case during the worst of the Liberation Day aftermath in the spring of 2025. but as soon as you see sequential progress being made, the market starts to look at a medium-term horizon instead of a short-term horizon for good reasons because we can obviously look through a month or two of disruptions if the medium-term outlook improves a lot.

16:28Andreas Steno Larsen:And it seems like the medium-term outlook is improving now, which is the exact opposite of the first week of the war where the medium-term outlook was worsening, while the flow was actually okay-ish, if you look at it in product terms. So we'll probably have a few weak months in terms of the actual end products. But as long as we see sequential progress, we can look into the medium-term outlook with increasing optimism. And therefore, I am still of the view, as I also wrote explicitly last week, that we bottomed in risk assets. and I think we're very close to peaking in oil as well. I'm a little bit more in doubt on some of the byproducts.

17:10Andreas Steno Larsen:We've been talking about helium, sulfur, and stuff like that for, I don't know, four or five weeks now. It's starting to become a little bit consensus to talk about that as well. I've seen so many LLM-ridden substacks on the topic that I most count. Most of them are completely wrong, by the way. So that is one thing that we've learned from this crisis as well. Once you see an exogenous shog, and I just want to get that out there, Michael. Once you see an exogenous shog, and I'm partially guilty of it myself, a lot of people just ask ChatGPT or Gemini, whatever, please unfold this for me. While there is no one-to-one historical comparison to use.

17:50Andreas Steno Larsen:So the model just hallucinates. The stuff that I've seen written on sulfur, for example, that will run out of copper as consequence of sulfur not leaving the straight is 100 % bullshit. I mean, when you look at the numbers, it's probably a couple of percent of the world's sulfur market that goes to mining. And for the miners, it's probably less than 0.5 % of their cost base. So it's basically a complete knocking-breaker when you look into the numbers. But it's been highlighted by many that it will end up creating shortages of everything from copper to, by the end of the day, semiconductors, everything we need for the AI and I think it's over it's overly blown out of proportion by now, especially by people who use artificial intelligence as if it was the truth and it's obviously not so for now I also speak to my view that artificial intelligence every time there's an exogenous shock to the system artificial intelligence becomes artificial stupidity, end of discussion

18:52Mikkel Rosenvold:So Andreas, this could be very very famous last words Andreas Stena sitting by the pool in sunglasses telling everyone that this is over. We're out of the woods. I need a cigarette now.

19:03Andreas Steno Larsen:I need a cigarette now.

19:04Mikkel Rosenvold:Absolutely, absolutely. This is very, very Euro of us. But Andreas, let's just talk a little bit more about the short-term risks, and then we'll get back to what the media term actually looks like, because there are still risks, sure. Trump is telling us that he's going to commit possible war crimes tomorrow. That's a whole different discussion. I know international law doesn't really matter anymore, but I mean, bombing bridges is not inherently a war crime. It's not automatically a war crime, but it's a war crime if there's no military use for bridges. And if you're not waging a land war, why do you need to blow up bridges?

19:40Mikkel Rosenvold:That is something that the U.S. military needs to consider for itself. And I think it's part of what drove Pete Hexeth to oust the Army Chief of Staff, Randy George, last week. There's probably also a lot of other issues between the two. But I think, I don't think we're going to see mass attacks and power plants and bridges tomorrow. It could be wrong, absolutely. But I think this is a matter of really, really squeezing up the pressure before some kind of ceasefire is reached. And that could be the onset of this, that could be the confirmation that we have about them. But obviously a big risk that Donald Trump is threatening to blow off power plants and bridges in Iran tomorrow.