The Only Bear Case Left Is Extinction

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

The 2026 Iran war may have finally convinced me that markets have completely abandoned the Mesozoic-era tradition of actually pricing risk.

For decades we were told that financial markets serve as vast information processing machines, constantly absorbing new developments, weighing probabilities, evaluating future cash flows, and incorporating uncertainty into asset prices. Fancy shit, right?

Entire academic careers have been built around this premise. Finance textbooks are filled with elegant explanations about risk premiums, discount rates, expected returns, and rational capital allocation. Investors are supposedly compensated for bearing uncertainty. Markets are supposedly forward looking. Asset prices are supposedly mechanisms through which society collectively evaluates risk.

John Daly was a great golfer and is a hilarious human being. He gets a pass on the golf course with how he dresses because he has the game, the smarts and the swagger to back it up.

Finance professionals were assumed to know the secrets of market valuation the rest of us didn’t. They, too, are supposed to have smarts and swagger. They were assumed to know facts so esoteric that we offered up similar societal permission for them to wear shit like this on purpose.

That all sounds very impressive until you actually observe what happens in practice. Finance doesn’t need analysts for anything, because nothing matters anymore. Like my blog, most analysis now is as useless as tits on a bull. And the Iran War just proved that the only bear case at this point appears to be total human extinction, so what’s the point of sitting around pontificating about anything finance related?

Especially dressed like you’re going to the f**king Kentucky Derby every day.

The war was officially announced on February 28, 2026. At the time, the S&P 500 was trading around 6,900. Now, if you subscribe to the increasingly radical belief that markets occasionally care about small inconveniences like war, famine, plague and pestilence, you might think the announcement of a major military conflict involving one of the most strategically important regions in the world would warrant a brief period of caution...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE 100% FREE HERE).