THE DEAN’S LIST: The Week Only One Asset Worked

Dean’s note:
Four straight weeks of losses. The S&P 500 fell below its 200-day moving average for the first time since March of last year. Brent crude settled above $112 on Thursday. The 10-year yield is pushing toward 4.4%. And the Fed basically told us: we see you, inflation, and we’re not in a rush to do anything about it. That’s a lot of bad vibes in one paragraph.

But here’s what I keep coming back to. Micron just reported the kind of quarter that makes you re-read the numbers because you think there’s a typo. FedEx raised guidance in the middle of a war. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang stood on a stage in San Jose and said the words “one trillion dollars.” Delta raised its revenue guidance. The economy is not collapsing. It’s being squeezed by a temporary energy shock. Those are two very different things, and understanding the difference is the whole game right now.

A week that started with hope and ended with a gut punch. Here’s what actually mattered:

Monday (March 16): Markets bounced hard. Oil dropped below $94 on WTI after the IEA’s 400-million-barrel reserve release started flowing. The S&P rallied 1% to close at 6,699. All three indexes were green. Then Nvidia’s GTC conference kicked off in San Jose, and CEO Jensen Huang told a packed arena he expects $1 trillion in orders for Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips through 2027. That’s double what he projected last year. AI is not slowing down because oil is expensive.

Tuesday (March 17): A modest follow-through. The S&P added another 0.25% to close at 6,716. Oil crept back above $100 on Brent as traders questioned whether the tanker escort plan would work. Energy stocks hit fresh 52-week highs with APA, BP, ConocoPhillips, Devon Energy all popping. Delta Air Lines raised its Q1 revenue guidance to high-single-digit growth, which tells you people are still flying and spending. Apollo’s chief economist went on TV and told everyone the Fed was going to stay put. He was right.

Wednesday (March 18): The big day. The Fed held rates steady at 3.50–3.75%, as expected, voting 11-1. Governor Stephen Miran was the lone dissent, wanting a cut. The dot plot still showed one 25-basis-point cut this year, same median as December. But here’s the shift: seven members now see zero cuts in 2026, up from six. Another four or five moved from expecting two cuts to one. Powell’s press conference was measured but blunt. He acknowledged the oil shock uncertainty but said the Fed would be “patient.” The Fed also bumped its inflation forecast to 2.7% PCE for the year and nudged GDP growth up to 2.4%. The S&P fell 1.36%. Then Micron reported after the bell and blew the doors off: $23.9 billion in revenue, nearly tripling year-over-year, with earnings of $12.20 per share versus the $8.79 expected. They guided next quarter to $33.5 billion. That’s a single quarter that exceeds their entire annual revenue from every year before fiscal 2025. The AI memory boom is not hypothetical.

Thursday (March 19): FedEx reported strong fiscal Q3 results with revenue of $24 billion, beating estimates, and raised full-year earnings guidance. CEO Raj Subramaniam said demand trends are holding despite the war. The stock jumped 9% after hours. But the broader market couldn’t hold. Brent crude pushed to $108. Reports surfaced that the administration is considering sending 2,000+ Marines to the region and weighing a ground operation to seize Iran’s Kharg Island. The S&P slipped 0.27%. Bond yields climbed. Initial jobless claims came in at 205,000, well below estimates.

Friday (March 20): The worst day of the week. By this time, it was clear commodities would be the only place to hide with all categories of equities and fixed income taking it in the shorts. And not all commodities, as gold and silver sold off. CBS reported that the Pentagon has made detailed preparations for deploying ground troops into Iran. That was enough. The S&P fell 1.51% to close at 6,506. The 10-year yield hit 4.39%, its highest close since last July. Gold, which had been above $5,500 at the start of the month, collapsed to $4,575 as investors sold everything to raise cash. Even bitcoin took a hit, hovering around $68,900. And then, after the close on Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that the administration is “getting very close to meeting our objectives” and is “considering winding down” the military campaign. How wonderful? In short order he would give Iran a 48 hour ultimatum to open Hormuz. How terrible? We will see, said the wise man.

Let me translate Wednesday’s Fed meeting for you.

What they said: rates on hold, one cut expected this year, inflation projections bumped to 2.7%.

What they meant: we have no idea what’s happening with oil, we’re not going to panic, and we’ll figure it out later.

The dot plot was the real story. Seven members now see zero cuts this year. Seven see one cut. Five see more than one. That’s a committee that is genuinely split, and when the Fed is split, they default to doing nothing. Which is exactly what happened.

The upgraded inflation forecast to 2.7% PCE was expected given oil’s surge. But the GDP growth nudge upward to 2.4% was a quiet signal that the Fed doesn’t think the economy is falling apart. They raised growth and inflation at the same time. That’s not a recession forecast. That’s a “the economy is running warmer than we’d like” forecast.

Dean’s note:
Here’s the thing nobody is talking about. Powell’s term expires May 15. Kevin Warsh, who is expected to take over, has a very different worldview. He’s been more open to rate cuts, particularly because he, like me, believes AI-driven productivity is a disinflationary force. Wednesday may have been one of Powell’s last meetings where his voice shapes the statement.

The Fed’s personality is about to change. The market hasn’t priced that in yet. CME FedWatch currently shows the next expected cut pushed to December. I think Warsh moves it up. Maybe not immediately, but faster than Powell would have. And keep in mind that all this rate volatility is good for everyone piled into money markets and short-term treasuries. While long-term bonds suffer, cash-like short-term bond and money market allocations are earning a nice yield.

Jensen Huang does not do small. Monday’s GTC keynote at the SAP Center in San Jose was nearly three hours of leather jacket energy, and the headline number was staggering: $1 trillion in expected orders for Nvidia’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin chip platforms through 2027. That’s double what he projected last year.

Let me put that in perspective. Nvidia reported $216 billion in revenue for the fiscal year through January. Huang is now projecting $1 trillion in orders over roughly two calendar years. The demand isn’t just growing. It’s accelerating.

Other highlights from GTC: Nvidia unveiled the Groq 3 Language Processing Unit, its first chip from the $20 billion Groq acquisition. It announced NemoClaw, a stack for building AI agents on the OpenClaw platform. An Uber partnership to launch AI-powered autonomous ride-hailing across 28 cities on four continents by 2028, starting with LA and San Francisco next year. Five major automakers are now building Level 4 autonomous vehicles on Nvidia’s platform. 

Meanwhile, Meta struck a $27 billion deal with Nebius Group for AI data centers, adding to its projected $115–$135 billion in capital expenditures for 2026 alone. That is nearly double last year’s spend.

Dean’s note:
AI infrastructure spending does not care about oil prices. That’s the takeaway. Nvidia, Meta, and the entire hyperscaler ecosystem are making multi-year bets measured in hundreds of billions of dollars. A temporary oil shock does not change the trajectory of artificial intelligence.

If anything, companies are accelerating automation spending precisely because human labor is getting more expensive. The Block layoffs from two weeks ago. The Amazon AI outage. FedEx’s “advanced digital solutions.” All roads lead to the same place. The companies building AI infrastructure are betting on a different economy than the one worried about gas prices.

I don’t use words like “blowout” lightly. Micron’s fiscal Q2 was a blowout.

Revenue: $23.86 billion. That’s up 196% from a year ago. Nearly tripled. Earnings per share: $12.20, crushing the $8.79 estimate. Gross margin: 74%, up from 37% a year earlier. Net income: $13.79 billion. Record free cash flow of $6.9 billion. And the guidance for next quarter? $33.5 billion in revenue. A single quarter that would exceed Micron’s entire annual revenue for every year before fiscal 2025.

What’s driving this? AI memory demand. Data center DRAM and NAND are in structural shortage. Customers are getting 50% to two-thirds of what they’re requesting. Micron is the only top-ten tech company with a rising stock this year, up 62% in 2026 after tripling in 2025.

They also announced a 30% dividend increase and signed their first five-year strategic customer agreement. That’s a company that sees years of demand ahead, not months.

Dean’s note:
Micron is the picks-and-shovels play for the AI memory revolution. When Jensen Huang says $1 trillion in chip orders, a significant chunk of that ecosystem requires memory. Every GPU needs HBM. Every data center needs SSDs.

Last week I told you Oracle’s $553 billion in contracted revenue was one of the most underappreciated numbers of the quarter. This week, Micron’s $33.5 billion guidance for a single quarter might be even bigger. The AI supply chain is printing money while the rest of the market is scared of oil.

FedEx is one of those companies I always pay attention to because it touches everything. It ships packages, freight, and logistics across the entire economy. When FedEx is struggling, the economy is struggling. When FedEx raises guidance during a war with oil above $100, that tells you something.

Revenue: $24 billion, beating estimates. Adjusted EPS: $5.25 versus the $4.09 expected. Full-year guidance raised. And CEO Raj Subramaniam said on the earnings call that demand trends in the first two weeks of March were in line with expectations despite the war.

Dean’s note:
When a company that moves 16 million packages a day tells you demand is holding up during a geopolitical crisis, listen. FedEx isn’t guessing. They see the actual packages moving through the system. Their fuel surcharge adjusts weekly. They’ve already rerouted around the conflict zone.

This is a company that has built the resilience to weather exactly this kind of storm. For investors, FedEx earnings are the closest thing we have to a real-time economic pulse check. And right now, the pulse is steady.

This is the one that’s confusing everyone. Gold was trading above $5,500 at the start of March. As of Friday, it’s around $4,575. That’s a 17% decline in three weeks during a war. Gold is supposed to go up during geopolitical conflict. What happened?

Two things. First, rising interest rates. When the 10-year Treasury yield pushes from under 4% to 4.39%, gold becomes less attractive because bonds start paying you real income. Gold pays you nothing. Second, margin calls and cash raising. When markets sell off this aggressively, investors sell everything to raise cash and cover positions. This is exactly what happened in early 2020 when gold initially fell during the COVID crash before surging to new highs later in the year.

Dean’s note:
Don’t let gold’s short-term decline trick you into thinking the thesis is broken. Gold is still up massively over the past two years. What we’re seeing is a liquidity event, not a fundamental shift.

Once the selling pressure eases and rate expectations stabilize, gold will find its footing. If you’re a long-term gold holder, this is noise. If you’ve been waiting for a pullback to take a position, well, here it is.

Temporary crises are where permanent wealth is built.

Four weeks of losses. The S&P is down 7.4% from its January high. Oil is spiking. The Fed has its hands tied in a lose-lose scenario. Ground troops in Iran are being discussed out loud. Gold is disappointing the bugs. Bond yields are disappointing 60/40 portfolio enthusiasts positioned too far out on the curve still. If you’re feeling like this is the worst stretch since the tariff panic last spring, you’re right. It might be worse.

But let me give you the other side of the ledger. Because the other side matters more right now.

Here’s my framework for the week ahead:

•  Trump’s Friday evening Truth Social post is important, even with the ultimatum that came soon after. With global solidarity over the Strait of Hormuz growing, the path to resolution is wide open. Nobody knows if this is the week, but this will be the catalyst for oil crashing, yields dropping, and the market ripping higher. Remember, the S&P 500 hasn’t even hit a 10% correction yet. My view is the likelihood of a correction is similar to that of a meaningful conflict resolution. 

•  Oil futures for 2027 are still in the high $60s. I keep saying this because it’s the single most important chart in the world. The futures market is screaming that this is temporary. Brent at $112 today and $68 in 2027 is the definition of a war premium. The market is paying you to be patient.

•  The AI economy is operating in a parallel universe. Nvidia’s $1 trillion in orders. Micron’s $33.5 billion quarter guidance. Meta’s $27 billion Nebius deal. FedEx’s automation-driven margin expansion. These companies are not living in the same economy as the one fretting over gas prices. When the oil shock fades, the AI infrastructure story will be the one left standing.

•  The Fed’s leadership change is the most underpriced catalyst on the board. Powell is gone by mid-May. Warsh is a different animal. He’s talked about AI-driven productivity as disinflationary. He’s more open to cuts. The market is pricing in zero to one cuts for 2026. Under Warsh, that number could change fast.

•  Retail investors chasing oil ETFs at all-time highs? Still a yellow flag. We saw $211 million pour into oil ETFs in a single day two weeks ago. Energy is up near 30% year-to-date. That’s real performance. But buying oil at $112 Brent is very different from buying at $67. Be careful chasing a trade that’s already had its move.

•   Keep contributing to your 401(k). 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 7% from its high feels terrible. That’s exactly the point. You are buying at lower prices than you were in January. That’s how compounding works. Show up. Every paycheck. No exceptions.

Four straight weeks of losses. The longest losing streak since March 2025. Oil above $100 for a third week. A war with no clear end date. Bond yields at eight-month highs. Gold diving. I understand if your stomach is turning.

But I keep coming back to the same facts I’ve been writing about for a month now. Oil futures say this is temporary. The policy response is the largest since 2022. The economy is bending, not breaking. AI infrastructure demand is accelerating through the noise. And now, for the first time, the president is publicly floating an end to the war.

Temporary crises are where permanent wealth is built. Not enjoyed. Built. But Dean, what if you’re wrong? Of course that can happen. Bear markets are not Instagram Reels or YouTube Shots. They are long-form drama. A Hollywood epic running over three hours.

We have time. Moving averages will be breached and the breaches will hold. The stock market will try to humiliate the bears by staging some relief rallies that will inevitably fail. This action takes many months, not days or weeks. The headlines will be optimistic at every rebound, not doomsday. And finally the second half of 2026 would start to look different from the typical mid-term rally seen during many lame duck Presidencies.

We have a 10% cash buffer for a reason. We’re getting closer to putting it to work every single week. Not yet. But close, we think.

Stay zoomed out. Breathe. And watch the Strait of Hormuz shipping data, Trump’s Truth Social feed, and the bond market. In that order.

— Dean

P.S. Here’s the number that sticks with me this week: Micron’s next-quarter revenue guidance of $33.5 billion exceeds the company’s entire annual revenue for every year before fiscal 2025. That’s what structural demand looks like. When the AI infrastructure companies are posting numbers like that during a war, an oil shock, and a four-week market selloff, it tells you the spending cycle is real and durable. That doesn’t mean every AI stock is a buy today. It means the picks and shovels of this revolution are minting cash at a pace we’ve rarely seen in any industry. Watch the memory companies. Watch the hyperscalers. The future is being built right now, one GPU and one memory chip at a time.

And one more thought. The S&P 500 broke below its 200-day moving average on Wednesday for the first time since March 2025. Over the past decade, the average drawdown from similar breakdowns has been about 17%. But here’s the other side: the S&P has averaged a 16% gain in the twelve months following every single one of those breakdowns. The pain is real. So is the recovery. Every time.

👉 What if building real wealth in 2026 isn’t about reacting to every headline, but about having a plan that works in any environment? My Single-Digit Millionaire portfolio shows how to mix stocks, cash, gold, and even bitcoin in a way that protects you and gives you room to grow. Click to see why this balanced approach could quietly put you ahead while everyone else is guessing.