📊 The Most Boring Position in Markets Was Also the Best One
The Edge Of Markets score closes the week at 5.22 — Neutral territory (30% QQQ / 70% Cash). Not exciting. Not leveraged. Not heroic. Just 70% sitting in cash while the world figured out how to set itself on fire from multiple directions simultaneously.
And you know what? Boring worked. The Nasdaq dropped 1.6% on Friday alone. If you were 100% long, congratulations — you donated 1.6% of your portfolio to the market gods. At 30% exposure, that's a 0.48% hit. The other 70%? Watching from the sidelines like someone who left the party before the cops showed up.
QQQ closed at $599.75 — a full $14.05 below the 70-day EMA of $613.80. That gap has been widening all week like a slow-motion breakup. No EMA override. We follow the score.
Final Recommendation: 30% QQQ / 70% Cash
Sometimes the best trade is the one you don't make.
🔥 A Week So Bad It Deserves Its Own Wikipedia Page
Let's just appreciate the sheer comedic timing of this week. In the span of five trading days, we got:
- A shooting war with Iran that shut down the Strait of Hormuz — you know, the tiny waterway that 20% of the world's oil passes through. No big deal.
- Oil prices up 36% in a single week — the biggest weekly gain since futures literally started trading in 1983. Forty-three years of oil trading history, and this week said "hold my barrel."
- A jobs report showing the economy lost 92,000 jobs when Wall Street expected a gain of 50,000. A 142,000-job miss. That's not a rounding error, that's a different reality.
- Oh, and December was revised to -17,000. So that month we thought added jobs? It didn't. Three job losses in five months. Cool.
- Global tariffs at 10% and climbing, with 24 states suing the administration while Canada gets exemptions on a rolling basis like some kind of trade policy subscription service.
And the Dow is... still above 47,000. The S&P is at 6,740. We're in a war, the economy is actively shedding workers, oil is at levels that would've caused panic in any other decade, and the market is down like 3% from highs. The resilience is either admirable or delusional. I genuinely can't tell anymore.
🍝 The Stagflation Special: Now Being Served Whether You Ordered It or Not
Here's the beautiful irony of the current macro setup. The economy is losing jobs. Wages are still running at 3.8% annually. Oil just had its best week since Reagan was president. And the Fed gets to sit there on its hands pretending everything is manageable.
Cut rates? Oil is screaming toward $100 and every $10 adds ~0.3% to CPI. You'd be pouring gasoline on an inflation fire — literally, in this case, since gasoline is the problem.
Hold rates? You just watched 92,000 jobs evaporate. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%. Average unemployment duration is 25.7 weeks — the longest since December 2021. People aren't just losing jobs, they're staying unemployed.
Raise rates? Sure, if you want to speedrun a recession while a war is happening. Bold strategy.
The Fed is basically that meme of the guy sweating over two buttons. Except both buttons say "economic pain" and there's no third option. Powell's going to need a bigger podium to hide behind at the next press conference.
⛽ The Strait of Hormuz: Still Closed, Thanks for Asking
Remember Tuesday, when Treasury Secretary Bessent promised Navy escorts would reopen the strait and the market ripped 1.3%? The Nasdaq partied. The Dow gained 238 points. Hope was alive.
Three days later: crude tanker traffic is still down 88%. LPG carriers down 94%. Iran's IRGC is threatening to hit any tanker that moves. Four vessels have already been attacked. The Trump administration's response? A $20 billion reinsurance program. Because when shipping lanes are literally under military assault, what you really need is better insurance paperwork.
Goldman's head of oil research says the market is pricing in a four-week disruption. If it goes longer — and there's zero evidence it won't — we're looking at triple-digit oil. Morgan Stanley is already modeling $110 scenarios. At that point, you're not just talking about expensive gas. You're talking about a fundamentally different inflation regime for the rest of 2026.
But hey, at least we got those de-escalation hopes on Tuesday. Those were fun while they lasted — about 48 hours.
🤖 Meanwhile, in the AI Bubble: Marvell Doesn't Care About Your Problems
The single best-performing stock on the worst day of 2026 was Marvell Technology, up 16%. On a day when the economy literally shed jobs, oil broke $90, and the geopolitical outlook could charitably be described as "on fire," Marvell said "we made $2.2 billion in revenue and AI demand is insatiable" and the market threw money at it like a tech-drunk college fund.
Their custom AI ASIC business went from near-zero to $1.5 billion in annual revenue in a single fiscal year. Guidance for next year: $11 billion. The year after: approaching $15 billion. Bank of America upgraded them. JPMorgan raised their target to $135.
There's something deeply poetic about the fact that the only thing thriving in this economy is the technology designed to replace human workers. The jobs report says humans are getting fired. Marvell says the robots are hiring. At least someone's having a good quarter.
🎯 My Take: The Score Was Boring. Boring Was Brilliant.
I'm going to be honest: when the score sat at 5.22 all week — Neutral, 70% cash — it didn't exactly make for exciting analysis. No dramatic shifts. No bold calls. No "the model saw something no one else did" narrative. It just sat there. Neutral. Boring.
And that boring posture meant that Friday's massacre — the worst jobs report in years, oil at 2023 highs, the Nasdaq dumping 1.6% — cost the recommended portfolio less than half a percent. While fully-invested portfolios were bleeding, the score's 70% cash position was doing exactly what it was designed to do: keeping most of your money far away from the chaos.
The score briefly dipped to 5.14 (Cautious) on Wednesday morning — one tick from going full defensive with SQQQ. It pulled back to Neutral by the afternoon. That oscillation between Cautious and Neutral tells you the model is seeing real stress but hasn't hit the panic button yet. It's the equivalent of checking the emergency exits but not running for them.
Given that we're now dealing with a war, a supply shock, a labor market in freefall, and tariffs adding costs to everything — 70% cash feels less like caution and more like common sense. The score didn't predict the jobs report. It didn't need to. It just read the economic data and said "I don't trust this environment." Turns out the environment wasn't trustworthy.
⚠️ Bottom Line: Buckle Up, This Isn't Over
Score: 5.22 (Neutral: 30% QQQ / 70% Cash). QQQ at $599.75, $14 below the 70 EMA and falling. No override. Heavy cash heading into a week that could get worse.
What's coming:
- Strait of Hormuz — Every day it stays shut, oil climbs. The $20B reinsurance program is a band-aid on a bullet wound.
- Oil at $90+ — Goldman says the market is pricing four weeks of disruption. We're one week in. If this drags, $100+ is inevitable.
- Fed response — Powell now has to address both a collapsing labor market AND an oil-driven inflation shock. Good luck threading that needle.
- Tariffs escalating — 10% global tariffs with lawsuits piling up. Canada exemptions expiring April 2. More uncertainty nobody needs.
- QQQ vs. EMA 70 ($613.80) — The gap is widening. Every day below this level is another brick in the bearish wall.
This was the worst week of 2026. The economy is shedding jobs, oil is at crisis levels, a war is raging, tariffs are compounding the pain, and the only sector thriving is building chips to automate everyone's job away. The score says stay 70% cash. I'd say that's not cautious enough, but the data hasn't panicked yet — so neither should we. Emphasis on "yet."