THE DEAN’S LIST: The Week Oil Hit $100 and Nobody Knew What Came Next

Dean’s note:
This was the week Brent crude crossed $100 for the first time since the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. That sentence alone tells you where we are. The S&P 500 just posted its first three-week losing streak in about a year and hit a new low for 2026. Retail investors poured a record $211 million into oil ETFs on Thursday. It was the biggest single-day inflow ever. The fear gauge VIX is camping out in the high 20s. And Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, vowed to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed.

I am not going to shock you with my sentiment. Sell everything and hide under the mattress? No ma’am, not yet 😐. February’s CPI came in right at expectations with core inflation at 2.5%. Rent posted its smallest monthly gain since January 2021. The IEA proposed its largest oil reserve release in history to bring down crude prices. The administration temporarily lifted Russian oil sanctions to expand supply, which is a cheeky move. And JOLTs showed 6.94 million job openings, beating estimates. The economy is bending. It’s not breaking. And the policy response is accelerating.

A week that started with a $120 oil spike and ended with a whimper. Here’s what actually mattered:

Monday (March 9): Oil surged 20% in early Asian trading. Brent briefly touched $120. Futures dropped before the opening bell. Then something happened. Oil pulled back sharply as the administration signaled it was scrambling to intervene. By the close, markets were mixed. The S&P ended down only 0.18%. Energy Secretary Wright went on television saying the Strait would reopen in “weeks, not months.” 

Tuesday (March 10): Oil retreated about 7% to around $92 on talk of strategic petroleum reserve releases and possible easing of domestic drilling restrictions. Oracle crushed earnings after the bell with cloud revenue surging 44%. Meanwhile, Amazon’s AI coding tool caused a 13-hour outage on AWS after it deleted and recreated an entire environment. That sent a warning to every corporate tech team integrating AI at breakneck speed.

Wednesday (March 11): CPI day. February inflation came in exactly at expectations. Core CPI at 0.2% monthly, 2.5% annual. Rent rose just 0.1%, the smallest increase since January 2021. Egg prices fell 3.8%. Markets initially shrugged, then sold off as oil spiked again after Iran struck three cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz. 

Thursday (March 12): The worst day of the week. Brent crude settled above $100 per barrel. The S&P fell 1.52%. Iran’s new Supreme Leader vowed to keep the Strait closed. FedWatch data shifted dramatically: 44.7% chance of zero rate cuts for all of 2026. Only energy and utilities were green. Retail investors set a record, pouring $211 million into oil ETFs in a single day. That’s not institutional money. That’s regular people chasing the oil trade. Be very careful when that happens.

Friday (March 13): A modest rebound attempt that faded. The S&P lost another 0.61%, closing at 6,632, 5% below its recent high and a new low for the year. JOLTs job openings beat expectations at 6.94 million. Michigan Consumer Sentiment declined as gas prices and the war weighed on confidence. The S&P finished the week with its first three-week losing streak in about a year.

Let me take you back to March 2022. Russia had just invaded Ukraine. Brent crude blew past $100. The world panicked. Gas stations changed their prices daily. Inflation accelerated. The Fed hiked aggressively. The S&P 500 fell 25% from its peak. It was a miserable stretch.

Oil stayed above $100 from March to about July 2022 - roughly four months. Then it fell back below $80 by year-end. The S&P bottomed in October 2022. By the end of 2023, it was at all-time highs.

I bring this up because $100 oil is scary, but it’s not permanent. The world had a supply glut before this war started. Oil was trading in the low $60s just three weeks ago. There is plenty of crude on the planet. The problem is a shipping lane not supply. Oil futures for 2027 and 2028 are trading in the high $60s. The market is telling you this war premium should evaporate once the Strait reopens.

Only 77 vessels transited the Strait between March 1 and March 11, compared to nearly 1,300 during the same period last year. The policy response is ramping up fast. The IEA proposed releasing 400 million barrels. The administration temporarily lifted Russian oil sanctions. Energy Secretary Wright says the Strait will reopen in weeks. These are not small moves.

Dean’s note:
Here’s my honest read. $100 oil is painful but manageable if it’s temporary. The 2022 playbook tells you that. Oil above $100 for four months did not cause a recession. It, along with inflationary pressures that had nothing to do with oil, caused a bear market . Then came one of the strongest rallies in a decade.

The key variable is still the same one I’ve been writing about for three weeks: the Strait of Hormuz. If it reopens in the next few weeks, oil crashes back to $70, the war premium evaporates, and we’re looking at a buying opportunity. If it stays closed through spring, we’re looking at something worse. Maybe a stagflation scare, and a lot more pain in the first half of the year. I think the policy response tells you which way this is heading. When the IEA proposes releasing 400 million barrels and the administration lifts Russian sanctions in the same week, they’re telling you they will not let this spiral. Watch what they’re doing, not just what they’re saying.

Wednesday’s CPI report was the most important number nobody cared about.

February inflation came in exactly at expectations. Headline CPI: 0.3% monthly, 2.4% year-over-year. Core CPI: 0.2% monthly, 2.5% year-over-year. Both right on target. Shelter costs rose just 0.2%, with rent posting its smallest monthly gain since January 2021 at 0.1%. Food prices ticked up 0.4%, but egg prices fell 3.8%. Energy rose 0.6%.

In any other week, this would have been a celebration. Inflation trending toward the Fed’s 2% target. Shelter cooling. Core stable. Textbook setup for a rate cut.

But this isn’t any other week. This CPI data covers February before the oil shock. That will flow into March’s CPI report. The Fed meets March 18. Traders are assigning nearly 100% odds that they hold rates steady. The real drama is what happens next. FedWatch now shows a 44.7% chance that rates aren’t cut at all in 2026. The next expected cut has been pushed from July all the way to September. The Trump admin is too distracted with Iran to deal with the silly nonsense preventing Kevin Warsh from being confirmed. I imagine if we see darker clouds over markets and the economy in the next few weeks, Warsh’s confirmation will accelerate and rate cuts will arrive sooner than later.

Dean’s note:
February’s CPI told us the economy was on the right track before the war scrambled everything. Shelter cooling is genuinely positive. The question now is whether oil at $100 overwhelms that progress. History says oil shocks cause temporary inflation spikes, not permanent shifts.

The Fed knows this. They’ll be patient. And with Fed Chair Powell stepping down in May at the latest and Kevin Warsh likely taking over, the personality of the Fed itself is about to change. One more thing to watch.

This might be the most underappreciated story of the week.

Hims & Hers Health surged 13% on Wednesday after announcing that Novo Nordisk will distribute Ozempic and Wegovy through the Hims platform. This ends a longstanding feud between the two companies over compounded GLP-1 drugs. The stock had been hammered earlier this year. Now it’s one of the best performers of the week.

Why this matters beyond the stock price: GLP-1 drugs are the most important pharmaceutical story of the decade. Ozempic and Wegovy are transforming how we treat obesity, diabetes, and potentially heart disease. The barrier has always been access and cost. By putting these drugs on a telehealth platform with direct-to-consumer distribution, Novo Nordisk just made them dramatically easier to get. That’s bullish for Hims, bullish for Novo, and bearish for the middlemen who profited from complexity.

Dean’s note:
Healthcare access stories don’t move markets as fast as oil, but they compound longer. The GLP-1 market is expected to be worth over $100 billion by 2030. Every company that makes access easier will capture a slice of that. Hims just went from an also-ran to a distribution partner for the most in-demand drug class in the world. 

In a week dominated by oil and war, Oracle quietly delivered one of the most impressive earnings reports of the quarter.

Revenue: $17.19 billion, up 22%. Cloud revenue: $8.9 billion, up 44% year-over-year. Earnings per share: $1.79, beating the $1.70 estimate. And the eye-popper: remaining performance obligations, basically future contracted revenue, surged 325% year-over-year to $553 billion. That’s not a typo. 

Dean’s note:
Oracle is positioning itself as the fourth hyperscaler behind AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The RPO number tells you enterprise clients are locking in massive multi-year deals. This is the kind of story that gets ignored during a crisis and then shows up in your portfolio a year later as one of your best performers.

AI infrastructure demand is real and Anthropic’s $6 billion February confirms it. It won’t stop because oil hits $100. In fact, the Block layoffs we discussed last week prove the point: companies are investing in technology, not people. Oracle is another epicenter where that investment is going.

On Tuesday, Amazon Web Services suffered a 13-hour outage after the company’s AI coding tool deleted and recreated an entire production environment. The Financial Times reported that Amazon is now requiring junior engineers to get sign-off from senior managers before pushing AI-assisted code to production.

This came just days after a separate hour-long outage on Amazon’s main e-commerce site.

I bring this up not to scare you about AI, but to give you a more honest picture than the hype cycle allows. AI is powerful. It is also occasionally catastrophic. The same tool that lets a company fire 40% of its workforce (hi, Block) can also delete a production environment and take down a chunk of the internet for half a day.

Dean’s note:
This is the “move fast and break things” phase of AI deployment. The companies that figure out how to use AI safely will win. The ones that let AI tools run unsupervised will have very bad days. For investors, this creates a quality filter: look for companies that are deploying AI with guardrails, not just speed. AWS will be fine. But this outage is a reminder that the AI revolution will have more potholes than the marketing materials suggest.

This is the hardest stretch for investors since the tariff panic.

Three weeks of losses. The S&P is 5% below its recent high. Oil is knocking on $100. The Fed might not cut rates as soon as hoped.  Iran’s new Supreme Leader is vowing defiance. If you’re feeling uneasy, that’s rational. You should be paying attention.

But here’s the thing about paying attention: it’s not the same as panicking.

Here’s my framework for the week ahead:

•  The policy response is the story now, not just the crisis. The IEA proposing 400 million barrels of reserves. Russian oil sanctions temporarily lifted. The Navy moving to escort tankers. Domestic drilling restrictions being eased. These are not token gestures. When governments coordinate at this scale, they’re telling you the ceiling for oil is getting lower, not higher. The market will figure this out before the headlines do.

•   The Fed meets Tuesday and Wednesday. They will hold rates steady. That’s a given. The real question is what they say about the oil shock and inflation. If they signal patience, that’s bullish. If they signal concern about inflation spiraling, that tightens financial conditions further. Listen to the press conference, not the decision.

•  February’s CPI was good news buried under bad timing. Shelter cooling. Core stable. The inflation trend was heading in the right direction before the war. That underlying progress hasn’t been erased. It’s been overshadowed. There’s a difference. The March CPI, due April 10, will tell us how much of the oil shock is flowing through.

•  Retail investors chasing oil ETFs at record levels is a yellow flag. When regular people pile into a trade after a 50%+ surge, the easy money has usually been made. Energy stocks have earned their gains, up 24% year-to-date. But buying oil ETFs after Brent crosses $100 is not the same as buying them at $67. Be careful chasing momentum.

•   Oracle’s $553 billion RPO number is one of the most underappreciated data points of the quarter. AI infrastructure spending is accelerating despite everything else. The companies building the picks and shovels for AI don’t care about oil prices. Enterprise demand is locked in for years.

•   The Hims-Novo deal is the kind of story that compounds quietly. GLP-1 access just got dramatically easier. Healthcare innovation doesn’t make front pages during wars, but it makes portfolios over decades.

•   Keep contributing to your 401(k). I say this every week because it’s the most important advice I have. The $24,500 limit is in effect. If you’re 60–63, use the $35,750 super catch-up. Buying into a market that’s down 5% from its high feels terrible. That’s exactly the point. This is how wealth gets built. Not by timing the bottom. By showing up consistently.

Three weeks of losses. Oil at $100. A war that’s intensifying. An economy that’s slowing. This is the hardest stretch for investors since the tariff panic, and it might not be over.

But I keep coming back to the same two facts: oil futures for 2027 are in the high $60s, and the policy response is bigger than anything we’ve seen since 2022. The market isn’t pricing in a permanent crisis. It’s pricing a temporary one lasting longer than anyone hoped.

Temporary crises are where permanent wealth is built. Not enjoyed. Built.

We have a 10% cash buffer for a reason. We’re closer than ever to putting it to work. Not yet. But close.

Stay zoomed out. Breathe. And remember: the market is searching for a bottom, not falling off a cliff.

— Dean

P.S. Here’s the number I keep coming back to this week: 77 vessels through the Strait of Hormuz in the first eleven days of March, versus nearly 1,300 during the same period last year. That’s a 94% drop in traffic. When that number starts to climb - even slightly - oil prices will fall fast, the war premium will evaporate, and the market will rally hard. That’s not a prediction. It’s math. Watch the shipping data. It’s the most important chart in the world right now.

And one more thought. The S&P is adding Vertiv Holdings, Lumentum, Coherent, and EchoStar in its quarterly rebalance. All data center and networking names. The index is literally replacing consumer and HR software companies with AI infrastructure companies. Even the S&P 500’s own composition is telling you where the future is.

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