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In a series of posts on his Truth Social platform over the holiday weekend, President Donald Trump told Iran that it must open the Strait of Hormuz by 8 pm Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday or “all hell will reign down on them.” The main U.S. equity indexes were in the green for most of Monday’s trading session, even as crude oil prices continued to climb.
Expanding on his threat in a profanity-laced Sunday morning message, Trump said, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!”
The front-month West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures contract was up as much as 3.5% and closed with a gain of 0.6% at $112.20 per barrel. WTI is up more than 67% since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on February 28.
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“Stocks are cautiously optimistic that a ceasefire deal can be reached with Iran,” Louis Navellier of Navellier & Associates says. “The market is getting more comfortable with Trump’s shifting deadlines.” Navellier also notes stability in the bond market, where interest rates were flat today.
“Crude oil remains the focus,” he concludes. “With earnings season starting next week, we will get an insight into how the energy shock is being handled by management teams in various industries.”
At the closing bell, the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average had added 0.4% to 46,669, the broad-based S&P 500 was up 0.5% at 6,612, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite had risen 0.5% to 21,996.
Will the war kill the AI revolution?
“In our decades of covering tech stocks,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives writes in a Monday morning note, “there have been many nervous geopolitical backdrops over the years which have sent investors running for the elevators.”
Despite the war, Wedbush “is laser-focused on the progress of the AI Revolution,” and the analyst spent a few weeks on the ground seeing it for himself. “The message is clear from customers and CIOs,” Ives observes. “The rapid pace of AI adoption is underway and the focus is finding enterprise and department level use cases to launch in 2026.”
One of the biggest proponents of the AI boom, Ives says it “will translate into trillions being spent over the coming years.” AI is reshaping cybersecurity, for example, “as both the primary threat vector and the most significant demand catalyst the industry has seen in years.”
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Ives’ favorite cybersecurity stocks include CrowdStrike Holdings (CRWD, -0.1%), Palo Alto Networks (PANW, -0.8%), Zscaler (ZS, +0.7%), Check Point Software Technologies (CHKP, -0.03%) and Rubrik (RBRK, -1.1%).
At the same time, he says, the software sell-off is overdone. “Many enterprises are integrating AI across their tech stacks as a top IT priority,” Ives says, “and this dynamic is not being factored into current valuations.”
According to Ives, Microsoft (MSFT, -0.2%), Salesforce (CRM, -1.2%) and ServiceNow (NOW, +0.4%) “stand out as very disconnected selloffs relative to the AI monetization opportunities over the coming years.”
MSTR rises (and falls) with bitcoin
Officially, Strategy (MSTR, +6.6%) is still a software stock. But it’s no longer known as “MicroStrategy” for a reason, and it boils down to bitcoin.
Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, who led the name change in February 2025 and the company’s reorientation into a “bitcoin treasury” company after it started buying the world’s first cryptocurrency in August 2020, teased more bitcoin purchases in a Good Friday post on X.
Strategy said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it acquired 4,871 bitcoin (pdf) at $67,718 per from April 1 through April 5, and now holds 766,970 bitcoin at an average price of $75,644.
Meanwhile, Strategy generated a $14.46 billion unrealized loss on digital assets during the first three months of the year. The price of bitcoin declined from $87,508 on December 31 to $68,233 on March 31.
Bernstein analyst Gautam Chhugani has an Outperform (Buy) rating and a $450 12-month target price for MSTR because it “offers a high-beta exposure to bitcoin upside with the backstop of a resilient, liquid and pressure tested balance sheet.”
Chhugani has a year-end 2026 target of $150,000 for the world’s No. 1 cryptocurrency. Bitcoin was trading at $69,629 as of the closing bell on the New York Stock Exchange, with a gain of 3.4% over the trailing 24 hours.
Writing at the end of March, Chhugani noted that bitcoin had outperformed gold by 25% from the beginning of the war in the Middle East. “We continue to believe Bitcoin’s digital properties with global cross-border portability and censorship resistance are particularly valuable in periods of chaos,” Chhugani concludes.
