📊 Allocation Check: Nothing Changed, Everything Moved
Sunday night's post closed with NQ futures bid +0.87% to $27,835, the AAPL halo still working, and the score frozen at 4.86. Eleven hours later, two of those three are gone.
Pre-market has QQQ trading around $669 — about $5 off Friday's $674.15 ATH. The Iran tape took the futures bid and walked it back through the overnight session. The score, on the other hand, hasn't moved at all — no new print since Sunday 2:16 PM ET, the engine just hasn't fired this morning yet. So the macro read going into the open is identical to what it was at 10 PM Sunday, but the price action has shifted underneath it.
State going into the bell:
- Score: 4.86 (Sunday 2:16 PM print, Extreme Risk-Off raw)
- EMA 70 override: ACTIVE — QQQ +8.66% above the $620.47 EMA 70
- EMA 25 bull-stretch trim: ACTIVE — zone = above_6, distance = +5.96%, hysteresis holding the flag on
- Final allocation: 50% QQQ / 50% Cash — same trade since 2:00 PM Friday
- Ref: 4.94 from April 11 · Δ = −0.08, but still inside Extreme Risk-Off, so the 0.07 rule does not fire (no range change)
The trim was the right call when the print was $675 and the score was 4.77. With QQQ pulling back $5 pre-market and Brent ripping, it looks even better at $669. Half-cash into Iran headlines is a perfectly fine place to start the week.
🛢️ The Iran Tax Comes Back Online
The story this morning is not earnings, not Berkshire, not the Fed. It's Brent crude pressing $110-111, WTI back above $103, and the Strait of Hormuz situation that's been the real driver of the 2026 macro since February reasserting itself just as the tape started pretending it had gotten comfortable with $675 QQQ.
Reminder of where we are on this: WTI was $72.87 on February 27, the day before the U.S./Israel kicked off the Iran campaign. It's now flirting with $104. That's a roughly +43% energy move in nine weeks while the Nasdaq made an all-time high on the same chart. The IEA called it the largest oil supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The market called it Tuesday.
The bill is starting to land in the real economy. Spirit Airlines ceased all operations over the weekend, citing rising jet fuel costs despite a Trump administration attempt to keep the lights on. That's a $1B+ revenue carrier folded by a fuel curve nobody in the equity market is pricing into multiples. When a real company actually breaks because of a macro story, that's usually the part of the cycle where the market eventually has to pay attention. We're not there yet — QQQ closed Friday at an ATH — but the gap between price and reality is exactly what the score has been pointing at for 24 sessions.
🏛️ Berkshire Pops, Abel Sticks the Landing
Saturday's annual meeting was the first one without Buffett at the controls — Abel running the show, with Buffett in the audience cracking the "church with a casino attached" line. The Street's read: solid. Berkshire shares are up pre-market this morning, leading the green list on a tape where almost everything else is fading.
The earnings line that matters: Q1 profit more than doubled to $10.1 billion ($7,027 per Class A share) versus $4.6B a year ago. Most operating businesses improved, the investment portfolio added value, and Abel ruled out a break-up — full continuity with the Buffett playbook. For a market this concentrated in seven names, "the largest non-Mag-7 conglomerate keeps printing" is a small reassurance that something works outside of AI capex.
It also creates an interesting split-screen: Berkshire (cash-rich, defensive, no AI exposure) green pre-market while QQQ fades on Iran. That's not the textbook risk-on/risk-off pattern of the last three years. That's a tape sorting cyclicals from "expensive growth I'm not sure about anymore." Worth watching whether that holds through the open.
🎯 My Take: This Is a Friday Week
Here's what I think actually matters this week, in order:
- Friday 8:30 AM — April NFP. Consensus 49K jobs, unemployment 4.3%. 49K is well below the 12-month average. If we get sub-50K with unemployment ticking up, the rate-cut narrative reignites and the market gets to ignore Iran for another two weeks. If we get a beat, the Fed-on-hold story re-prices into yields and the QQQ bid gets tested for real.
- Tuesday 10 AM — ISM Services. March was 54.0 (down from 56.1 in February). Another step lower and the soft-data slide that started in March becomes a trend.
- Wednesday — ADP. Always a noisy preview of Friday but the pre-NFP positioning trade is built around it.
- Earnings: AMD, Palantir, Disney, Uber, Coinbase. AMD is the AI-capex tell. Coinbase has a crypto-legislation tailwind from a deal reached on a key provision over the weekend. Palantir is Palantir.
Everything between now and Friday's print is positioning. The score sitting at 4.86 with the trim active is exactly where you want to be heading into a binary macro event with energy doing what it's doing — half exposure, half dry powder, and the EMA 70 still saying the trend hasn't broken.
The thing I'm watching: if QQQ rolls below the EMA 25 over the next few sessions and distance drops back through +5%, the trim flag clears and the floor resets to 100% QQQ. Counter-intuitive, but that's how the system works — pull-backs from stretched levels are the moments to add, not subtract. Won't happen this morning, but if Iran drives a real pull-back into NFP, that re-engagement is on the table for the back half of the week.
⚠️ Bottom Line
Same trade, new headlines. 50% QQQ / 50% Cash, override on, trim on, ref still 4.94 from April 11. The score hasn't given a new signal since Sunday afternoon, and at $669 pre-market with Brent at $111, the trim continues to look like the smartest thing the model has done all month.
Markets at record highs, breadth at dotcom-era narrowness, oil ripping on a war, an airline just folded over fuel costs, and the consensus view is that 49K jobs is fine. Half cash is not a bearish posture — it's the only sane one until Friday tells us something new.