Han Dieperink

Every time an oil crisis occurs, the recession scenario is immediately dusted off. The oil price rises, analysts pull out their charts, and within a week the first warnings appear that a recession is inevitable. But the relationship between oil crises and recessions is much weaker than is commonly assumed.

There was a time when software companies could rely on growth rates and compelling narratives about scalable business models. Revenue was paramount, profit an afterthought. A decade ago, investors routinely paid six to ten times annual recurring revenue for SaaS businesses, and that felt entirely reasonable. Anyone who raised concerns about cash flow was dismissed as an old-fashioned investor who did not understand the future. That era has ended.

While the whole world was watching the Serena Hotel in Islamabad, where the ceasefire negotiations on Iran were taking place, the real news last week unfolded 6,000 kilometers away.

The world was already electrifying at a rapid pace. But two developments are now pushing this process into an acceleration that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago.

The war against Iran has now lasted a month, and the consequences are becoming visible at a rapid pace. The conflict began as an American-Israeli operation targeting Iran’s nuclear program and the regime in Tehran. But while the United States and Israel are dropping bombs, Europe is absorbing the heaviest economic blows. The result of decades of failed European energy policy, strategic dependency, and a lack of geopolitical power.

Necessity breaks laws, but it also breaks existing patterns, paradigms, and drives innovation. Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. Not abundance or curiosity, but circumstances in which delay is not an option.

An unprecedented wealth transfer is underway. Over the next two decades, an estimated 124,000 billion dollar in assets will shift globally from the baby boomer generation to younger generations.

Within one hundred hours, American and Israeli forces struck nearly 2.000 targets in Iran. Ayatollah Khamenei and dozens of senior officials were killed. It is the largest American military operation in the Middle East since 2003. The initial market reaction was remarkably muted, but the oil price tells a different story.

Stocks follow earnings per share. Over the long term, the correlation between earnings growth and share price performance is as high as 98 percent. Everything else is noise. Macro fears, geopolitical tensions, quarterly results that fall short by a fraction — in the long run, they hardly matter. What counts is how much a company earns and how those earnings develop over time.

The S&P500 is virtually unchanged this year, but beneath the surface the US equity market is moving more than it has in years. More than one fifth of all stocks in the index have already risen or fallen by more than 20 percent this year. The gainers are clearly in the majority: about two out of three. Yet you do not see that reflected in the index itself. How is that possible?