Good morning and welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on the stories moving money right now.
Iran escalated sharply overnight, launching strikes on what it described as strategic U.S. military assets in Kuwait and Bahrain, following an earlier drone attack in Egypt. The moves sent a jolt through risk markets, with oil and safe haven assets reacting swiftly. Investors are watching closely for any U.S. response that could further destabilize the region and energy supply chains.
Turning to equities, Microsoft added nearly five hundred billion dollars in market capitalization in a single session Thursday, a more than seventeen percent surge after reporting Azure revenue crossing one hundred billion dollars for the first time. Cloud revenue climbed twenty-seven percent year over year. The debate now is whether this confirms a genuine artificial intelligence earnings moat or simply reflects a market willing to price perfection into any headline that mentions AI.
And a valuation warning worth noting: the cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio, known as the CAPE ratio, has now closed above forty for three consecutive months. That has happened only once in the past one hundred years, during the dot-com era. History does not repeat, but the parallel is drawing serious attention from risk managers and long-term allocators alike.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
