TO: Anyone still long risk assets
FROM: The Market
DATE: March 10, 2026
RE: A few updates you may have missed while refreshing oil futures
Please be advised that the following developments have occurred in the past 48 hours and are entirely consistent with a healthy, well-functioning financial system.
RE: Equities
The S&P 500 has now erased all of its 2026 gains. As of Tuesday morning, it sat roughly 4% below its late-January record, having shed over 2% in a single session. The Dow shed 1,084 points on the day. The Nasdaq, which came into the year wearing the most expensive valuation in the room, has been the most cooperative about giving things back.
Monday provided a brief reprieve. The S&P bounced 0.9%, the Nasdaq clawed back 1.3%, on reports that the Strait of Hormuz was beginning to reopen and that the military campaign was nearing a close. WTI pulled back toward $86 from its overnight spike of $119. Broadcom and AMD surged over 4% apiece, reminding everyone that this market still wears semiconductors like a security blanket. Wells Fargo stayed soft. Boeing continued its long, distinguished tradition of going down.
Then Tuesday arrived and futures slipped again. Because the war hadn't actually ended. Because oil was still near $90. Because the February CPI print drops Wednesday and nobody in their right mind thinks it's going to be friendly.
The market is, to use the technical term, a mess.
RE: Gold
Gold sits at $5,175 this morning. Its all-time high, set on January 29th, was $5,595. It has since corrected — corrected — to levels that would have seemed hallucinatory eighteen months ago. The metal has gained roughly $2,200 per ounce in a single year. Central banks kept buying. ETF inflows ran at their highest pace since the pandemic. And now a war, genuine uncertainty about the dollar's safe-haven premium, and a Fed trapped between inflation and recession has given the bulls everything they could possibly want short of a manifesto.
There is a version of this story where gold is just doing its job — the job it was assigned at Bretton Woods and has been moonlighting at ever since. Insurance. Uncertainty proxy. The thing you buy when you don't trust anything else denominated in fiat. Fine.
There is another version where $5,175 gold is itself a signal — not just of fear, but of something structural and slower-moving. Central banks in China, India, and Poland have been accumulating for three years. Reserve diversification away from US Treasuries has been gradual, then not so gradual. When the institutions responsible for anchoring faith in the dollar-denominated financial system quietly start hedging against that system, paying attention seems like a reasonable minimum.
Wednesday's CPI will either calm the room briefly or pour gasoline on it. The setup is not comfortable.
RE: Private Credit
Blackstone's BCRED received $3.7 billion in redemption requests during the first quarter — 7.9% of the fund's net asset value, against a standard cap of 5%. To avoid gating — which would have produced the kind of headline that travels — Blackstone raised the limit to 7% and injected $400 million of its own employees' capital to cover the remainder. Every request filled. Not a single investor prorated. The press release emphasized strength, alignment, and the fund's 9.8% annualized return since inception.
JPMorgan, in a research note that contained the phrase "significant expression of souring investor sentiment toward direct lending," pointed out this was BCRED's first quarter of net outflows. Full stop.
Blue Owl, meanwhile, walked back its promise of resuming quarterly redemptions at NAV and has effectively restructured one of its retail debt vehicles into a drawdown fund — meaning it's now returning capital to investors on its own schedule, not theirs. New Mountain Finance Corporation sold $477 million of assets to a third party. The private credit sector's software exposure is the wound that won't close: AI disruption fears have hammered valuations on middle-market software loans, and these funds are neck-deep in them.
The pattern has its own precedent. In 2023, Blackstone gated its flagship non-traded REIT. The headline was managed, the rationale was explained, the underlying was defended. What followed was an 18-month reappraisal of the entire non-traded real estate complex. RA Stanger, which tracks alternative assets with the zeal of someone who has seen this movie before, is now forecasting a 40% year-over-year decline in BDC capital formation for 2026. The retail wealth channel that asset managers spent the last four years cultivating as their growth engine is showing signs of becoming their problem.
One senior industry executive, speaking privately to InvestmentNews and exercising the gift of understatement, said: "Some of these BDC funds are so big, and that can be a problem."
Profound.
RE: The Dollar and FX
The dollar index added around 0.9% on Tuesday — a significant single-session move. Safe haven flows. The kind that happen when global investors decide that, whatever is wrong with America right now, it remains the least bad option by the currency-in-a-crisis metric. Sterling fell. The euro fell. The Australian dollar fell. Emerging market currencies — Brazilian real, Mexican peso, Indian rupee — all posted notable losses.
This is interesting because the dollar's safe-haven premium has been a contested idea for the better part of three years. De-dollarization has been slow but not fictitious. And yet here we are, crisis mode, and the DXY still catches the flight-to-quality bid.
The uncomfortable wrinkle is that crude oil is also up, sharply, in dollar terms. Normally these two move inversely. The war has broken that relationship — for now. Both the dollar and oil are rallying together, which is the currency market's version of a stress fracture: not catastrophic in the moment, but diagnostic.
RE: The Week Ahead
Wednesday: February CPI. The consensus is sitting around 3.1% year-over-year headline, 3.3% core. Either number above consensus and you get another leg lower in equities. Either number at or below and you get a relief rally that will almost certainly be sold into by Thursday.
Tuesday evening: Oracle earnings. The market has decided Oracle is the bellwether for AI infrastructure spending that doesn't have Nvidia's name on it. If cloud and database growth disappoint, the narrative about "AI spending broadening beyond the hyperscalers" gets quietly shelved.
Thursday: Adobe. Another AI-adjacent proxy, another chance for the market to decide whether the software sector is a beneficiary or a casualty of what's coming.
March 18th: The Fed. Which will hold rates, revise its dot plot, and say something careful about energy inflation that reads like it was drafted by a committee of people who all disagreed with each other.
CONCLUSION
The S&P has wiped a year's gains in roughly eight sessions. Gold is up $2,200 in twelve months and still has buyers. The world's largest private credit fund had to deploy employee capital to avoid a public relations event. Oil went from $71 to $119 in two weeks, bounced to $86, and may do something completely different by Friday. Bitcoin continues to audition for multiple narrative roles simultaneously without committing to any of them.
In other words: everything is fine, the market is efficient, prices reflect all available information, and the people managing your retirement assets have a plan.
Please govern yourself accordingly.
