The BIG Report: April 2026

“War …. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing”. For all of you that only know this quote through Elaine from a Seinfeld episode, it’s NOT Tolstoy. It’s actually from a song recorded by Edwin Starr that sat at number 1 atop the U.S. Billboard top 100 songs for three consecutive weeks back in 1970. I suddenly hear Casey Kasem’s voice in my head, who coincidentally began hosting America’s Top 40 in July of 1970, just a few weeks before Starr’s song made it to number one.

Okay, what was the point of all of that? Not much outside of America involving itself in another foreign war. I certainly understand that when a leader of a country one third the size of America, with 90 million citizens is consistently calling for the death and destruction of America, we shouldn’t take it lightly. That said, it’s not comfortable shooting first. My foreign policy aligns much more with George Washington than George W. (Bush), I didn’t like that we shot first in Iraq either. 

Given all that has been going on, we delayed our issue of this quarter’s newsletter a couple of weeks to see how things shaped up with the war in Iran because as of late, that’s ALL markets have seemed to care about. Now, halfway through April, it seems as though the market believes this may be drawing to a close. Let’s hope so. The S&P 500, which had been down about 8% year to date, is now back to positive on the year. Oil, which had been around $120 a barrel is back down in the $80’s. 

Will this rebound last? Your guess is as good as mine. Currently, it’s hard to make heads or tails as to whether things are actually progressing towards peace or not. On one hand, we hear the Strait of Hormuz is open and then we hear it’s closed. And this is important because not only is it a major throughfare for oil, other products like fertilizer and helium traverse those waters (about 30% to 35% of world supply EACH). Without helium, chip companies can’t cool things down enough to make semiconductor chips and without the free flow of fertilizer products, we’ll likely see additional food inflation as the cost of fertilizer drives up prices.

The good news is that the moves we made in 2025 in preparation for a potentially rough 2026 have helped us (and your portfolios) tremendously. Last year was a bit painful for clients with taxable accounts as we took quite a bit of profits off the table generating long-term capital gains for clients with tax exposure. That said, we took those profits and shifted them into a managed futures strategy. This is a strategy that tracks the trends in commodities as they are driven up or down by commercial traders (called Commodity Trading Advisors or CTA’s). Studies have conclusively shown that commodity trend following strategies can both increase returns and reduce risk as they are not correlated to EITHER stock or bonds. You may recall 2022 when both stocks and bonds went down together. Having this strategy in the mix helps to protect us from that in the future. 

As of March 31, 2026 the S&P 500 was negative 4.6% year to date, bonds were flat to negative on the year and our managed futures strategy was up 12.6%. Since we had made this strategy the largest position in almost all of our models, it had a significant impact on keeping our clients positive for the year while the markets were suffering in pretty significant fashion.

So what to expect moving forward? Well, the market was lousy before the War in Iran. It’s been sideways since October of last year. Themarket broke below a key, month end indicator that I follow very closely at the end of March.  There have only been a few times in the last 100 years where the market broke this monthly indicator and significant additional pain did not follow. This may be one of those rare occurrences, but we are not going to take those odds and pile into stocks any further than we already have. 

It’s still a mid-term election year and the market tends to dish out more pain than we’ve seen so far in mid-term election years. We also have a new Fed Reserve Chair to be installed in May (replacing Jay Powell) and the market has a history of welcoming new Fed Chairs with double digit declines in the proceeding 6 to 12 months of their installation. On top of all of that, the market is still expensive even after its declines, the job market continues to be weak, inflation continues to be sticky, economic data somewhat cloudy and earnings so hot that one has to question if we’re approaching “peak earnings” for the stock market. These things don’t even take into consideration the other list of warning signs I cited in last quarter’s newsletter. 

Now please understand, I’m not making dire predictions. There’s a lot of good to talk about in our economy at the moment as well. The consumer has been incredibly strong. The market has been incredibly resilient in the face of war and uncertainty (it really didn’t go down much at all) and oil surprisingly tame in the face of everything. I’m truly surprised oil did not shoot up to over $200 a barrel, which by the way would have needed to get up to about $230 or so to create the same pain we felt when it hit $148 back in 2008. 

So putting it altogether, the economy, the consumer, and the markets as a whole, have been relatively strong and this bodes well for more upside in future months. I still simply don’t love the risk vs reward proposition of the market at this time. We love to buy and get “overweight” stocks when things are TERRIBLE! Yes, when you open your statement and feel a bit queasy, that is when we are usually making the moves that have made you the most money in years past. It’s currently hard to find good bargains in this market. As such, we are staying overweight in foreign markets which have also helped us quite a bit year to date. We are maintaining substantial exposure to short and intermediate bonds throughout the risk spectrum and we continue to hold our managed futures strategy as it has already proven itself to shine when everything else is doing poorly. 

So in closing, things look as though they’re improving, but we are only cautiously optimistic, with the emphasis on cautiously. The good news is we shifted our models last year from very U.S. stock heavy to more “all weather” portfolio and as such, we feel extremely comfortable with whatever may come next … up … down or sideways. If the market has a substantial move and you feel queasy when opening your statement, we’ll likely be adding more to stocks because we have less stock exposure now than we’ve had in a few years. 

As for the war and its impacts. We’ll have to wait and see. Ah…. that leads me to an ACTUAL Tolstoy quote "The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." 

On behalf of our entire B.I.G. Team, thank you as always for your trust and confidence. 

David F. Boothe

President, Chief Investment Officer