Welcome to Markets Desk, here's what's moving the tape this hour.
Brent crude has slipped back below seventy-two dollars and forty-eight cents a barrel, erasing all of the gains tied to the Iran conflict and returning to late February levels. Gulf flows are picking up as the ceasefire holds, and that's pulling energy prices back to a pre-war baseline with real momentum behind the move.
That same ceasefire is rippling through insurance markets, where hull war coverage premiums for ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz have dropped by more than half. When underwriters cut war risk pricing that sharply, it signals genuine confidence in the durability of the truce, not just a temporary pause. Shipping costs should follow lower.
On the semiconductor side, Qualcomm surged fifteen percent after the company nearly doubled its projection for non-handset revenue by two thousand twenty-nine. The market has long viewed Qualcomm as a smartphone play, with handsets still accounting for roughly two-thirds of product revenue, but this guidance signals a credible pivot into automotive, industrial, and AI edge computing that investors clearly wanted to see.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
