Yes, I know I said we'd drop the subject, but that was before I knew the Onion was going to pick it up.

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You should really click through on this one. theonion.com/markets-surg...

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— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) March 24, 2026 at 11:06 AM

 I suppose it was only a matter of time.

NEW YORK—In what came as a welcome shock to investors amid recent dips in the global economy, markets reportedly surged Tuesday after President Donald Trump wrote in a Truth Social Post that he’d had sex with an angel. “I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS AN ANGEL HAS VISITED ME IN MY SLEEP AND I HAVE HAD VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE SEX WITH IT,” read the lengthy, all-caps post, which with its claims that a heavenly being had done “INCREDIBLE THINGS TO [the president’s] PENIS” immediately sent the S&P 500 soaring 2.1%.

Allison Morrow ran through the latest iteration in her newsletter.

ICYMI: Over the weekend, President Donald Trump set a Monday night deadline for Iran to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, or else the US would start attacking Iranian power plants. But around 7:30 am ET Monday, two hours before US financial markets opened, Trump postponed that deadline by five days, citing “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS” with Tehran toward a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION” of fighting. (All-caps style his, of course.).

 

Immediately, US stock futures soared and oil prices fell. The Dow, which had been on the verge of “correction” territory last week — nearly 10% off its most recent peak — briefly surged more than 1,000 points. It ended the day 630 points, or 1.4%, higher. The broader S&P 500 gained 1.2% and the Nasdaq rose 1.4%.

 

Now, because you’re all a bunch of Readers of News, you might be thinking: Come on, finance folks, are you really falling for this again? This is the same Trump who, just two weeks ago, told CBS that “the war is very complete,” prompting a similar stock rally and pullback in oil. And the same Trump who so frequently says things and then walks them back that there’s an entire trading strategy — called the TACO trade, for “Trump always chickens out” — based on the behavior.

 

So are you guys really buying it again?

 

The answer: It’s complicated.

 

The abrupt surge was not so much a sign that Wall Street believes Trump.

 

Rather, investors saw Trump’s statement — published just as many bleary-eyed New York traders would be bellying up to their Bloomberg terminals to start their work day — as a kind of reassurance that the president’s aversion to poor market numbers will ultimately keep him from acting on his more extreme threats.

 

“There’s no real fundamental reality to any of this trading — it’s just trading Trump,” Daniel Alpert, managing partner of Westwood Capital, told me.

 

And trading Trump is a lot of trading on vibes rather than, say, the truth. Is it true that Trump had talks about a resolution of fighting this week? Iran says no; Trump says yes. Most market participants have no way of knowing who’s right.

 

...

 

“If you’re trading markets, as opposed to investing, you’re focused on what other people think, what they’re likely to do,” Alpert said. “You may not think it’s good, and you may not even be sure it’s a lie, you just think that everybody else is going to think it’s good, and so you pile in with your order … When you’ve made enough money, you dump it, and that’s it, end of trade.”

Here's the thing about a Keynesian beauty contest: you can get to a point where you can't tell the smart money from the dumb money, and when that happens, I start to worry about how well markets keep doing things like allocating resources or protecting passive investors or not driving the economy over a cliff.