Iran just declared the Strait of Hormuz “completely open.”

Oil fell 9 percent. Stocks ripped to all-time highs.

Before you celebrate, read the next tweet. “Open” comes with three words buried in the announcement.

“On the coordinated route.”

Iranian state TV then clarified: passage “is not possible without coordination of the IRGC navy.”

That is not open. That is permissioned access.

SBI Funds Management is India’s largest AMC. It’s planning a ₹13,000 crore IPO by September.

Before inviting you in, the promoters paid themselves ₹3,562 crore in dividends. In just 9 months.

That’s more than the company earned in those 9 months.

Let me show you what I mean. 🧵 Here’s SBI Funds Management’s dividend history, straight from the DRHP.

FY2023: ₹176 Cr dividend on ₹1,340 Cr profit. 13% payout.

FY2024: ₹203 Cr on ₹2,073 Cr profit. 10% payout.

FY2025: ₹1,118 Cr on ₹2,540 Cr profit. 44% payout.

9M FY2026: ₹3,562 Cr on ₹2,433 Cr profit. 146% payout.

The dividend in 9 months of FY2026 is more than double the total dividends of the previous three full years combined.

The richest sovereigns on the planet just raised $9.5 billion in quiet.

Abu Dhabi $4.5 bn. Qatar $3 bn. Kuwait $2 bn.

All via private placements this April. No public roadshow. No price discovery.

When countries sitting on $3.5 trillion in sovereign wealth borrow in whispers, that is the story. Private placement means you call up Pimco, BlackRock, a handful of large funds, and negotiate the coupon directly.

You know your cost of borrowing before you sign.

Public markets force you to discover it in real time. Gulf states did not want that discovery.

Ask why.

This morning I posted three threads.

Thread 1: S&P rallying into the blockade.

Thread 2: Structural risks nobody is pricing.

Thread 3: Private credit gating underneath.

My conclusion: the market is front-running a deal that doesn’t exist.
12 hours later, the market proved the point in real time.
🧵 This morning on my watchlist:

Brent above $100.
Gold $4,767.
Gift Nifty +0.3%.
Nikkei +2.4%.

Right now:

Brent crashed to $95. Down 4%.
WTI collapsed to $92.60. Down 6.5%.
S&P up 1.08%. Nasdaq up 1.82%.
Gold up to $4,853.
Silver up nearly 5%.

Everything moved. In one day.

The RBI just changed the rules on Tata Sons.

New draft guidelines say every NBFC with over Rs 1 trillion in assets must list. No exceptions. No discretion.

Tata Sons has Rs 1.75 trillion.

This is not a suggestion. This is the regulator closing the escape hatch.
🧵 Quick context.

Tata Sons is the holding company that sits on top of the entire Tata Group. TCS, Tata Motors, Titan, Tata Steel, Air India, all of it.

66% is owned by Tata Trusts (philanthropic bodies). 18.34% by the Shapoorji Pallonji Group. The rest by Tata family members and smaller trusts.

It has never been listed.

Dubai just capped every foreign airline to one flight per day until May 31.

IndiGo had 15 daily flights approved. Air India had over 750 flights scheduled for April and May.

All cut to one per day per carrier. Thread on why this matters beyond aviation. Emirates and flydubai? No cap. Hundreds of daily flights, business as usual.

India was Dubai’s largest passenger source in 2025. 11.9 million travellers. The airlines serving those travellers are grounded. The home carriers fly free.

India imports 800+ tonnes of gold every year. Worth over INR 5 lakh crore at today’s prices.

How does it actually come into the country?

Through a system so opaque, so concentrated, that 30-40 dealers control the entire market.

Three stories this week connected the dots for me. A thread. Story 1: The exchange that was working, until it wasn’t.

IIBX, the bullion exchange in GIFT City, traded 92 tonnes of gold in FY25. Up from 8 tonnes the year before. Up from 411 kg the year before that.

Transparent pricing. BDR settlement every 30 minutes. Vaults in GIFT City and Chennai. 200 jewellers onboarded.

Then FY26 happened. Volume collapsed to roughly 600 kg for the full year.

The Indian rupee has two prices right now.

One in Mumbai. One in Singapore.

That gap tells you everything about what the RBI just did, and what it costs. Until last month, the onshore and offshore rupee markets moved together.

Traders in Singapore would bet on rupee direction through NDF contracts. That price signal would feed back into Mumbai. The two markets were one.

The chart shows this clearly. For most of 2025, the spread between them was near zero.

A reply from @PS4204625836664 in my comments stopped me cold.

I posted about gold falling 11.5% in March despite a Middle East war.

His pushback was the sharpest framing I have seen on this.

Gold is no longer money.

It is behaving like an index fund.
Agree or not? Here is what he meant.

Money in the true sense is stable in nominal value.

You put in 100. You get out 100.

It does not appreciate dramatically.

It does not crash.

That is what gold used to be inside central bank reserves.

The hardest form of money.

You held it. You never touched it.

Especially not in a crisis.

Gold hit $5,500 in January.

By end of March it had fallen 11.5%.

Everyone blamed profit-taking. ETF outflows. War jitters.

The real story is something central banks would rather not discuss. For three years, the gold bull run had one silent engine.

Central banks were buying at scale. 860 tonnes net in 2025 alone. The market assumed they were structural buyers. A permanent floor.

That assumption just broke.

The Philippines built a $30B call center empire on one thing: English-speaking graduates who could think on their feet.

9 in 10 Filipino children now can’t read a simple text by age 10.

The pipeline didn’t break overnight. It’s been draining for two decades. The BPO industry isn’t just worried about AI anymore.

They’re struggling to find people who can comprehend what they read.

“Communication is more than English fluency. It’s comprehension,” says the president of IBPAP, the country’s IT-BPO association.

You can’t train comprehension in a 2-week onboarding.

The IMF just flagged something most people missed in the Iran war coverage.

Not oil prices. Who owns emerging market debt now, and what happens when they want out. Foreign investment in EM stocks and bonds has grown eightfold since 2008.

Cumulative inflows approaching $4 trillion. Most of it debt. Most of that debt now held by hedge funds and investment funds, not banks.

Iran just submitted a 10-point proposal to end the war.

Trump called it “significant.”

That word matters more than the deadline. Three weeks ago, both sides weren’t talking.

Now they’ve exchanged multi-point proposals through Pakistan.

You can see the shape of a deal from here.

Jamie Dimon just sent his annual shareholder letter.

48 pages. The longest section isn’t about banking.

It’s titled “Critical Issues Facing America and the World.”

Thread. On Iran and oil:

“The war in Iran risks significant ongoing oil and commodity price shocks… which may lead to stickier inflation and ultimately higher interest rates than markets currently expect.”

Markets have already priced out rate cuts this year.

Dimon is saying that may not be enough.

India just resumed buying Iranian oil for the first time since 2019.

The headline is diplomatic. The reality is simpler.

India is scrambling for supply. A thread. In February, India was paying $69/barrel for its crude basket.

By March, that number hit $113.

A 64% jump in one month. Not a trend. A shock.

Numbers confirmed. Nifty Bank’s monthly fall the highest in six years. $95 billion market cap loss, 1.5x price to book, Fitch NIM compression 20 to 30 bps all sourced from the Bloomberg article you shared. Here is the tweet. Indian bank stocks just had their worst month relative to the broader market since COVID.

$95 billion in market cap wiped out since March 1.

The Nifty Bank narrowly avoided a bear market, a 20% drop from its recent high.

This week has one binary event that matters.

Everything else is noise.

A thread. 🧵 The Strait of Hormuz handles ~20% of global oil supply.

It’s been disrupted since Feb 28.
WTI is at $114. Brent at $111.

The market isn’t panicking. It’s pricing in a long war.

India’s forex reserves stand at $688 billion.

Headlines say: comfortable. 11 months of import cover.

Here is what the headline is not telling you. First, look at what is inside those reserves.

Foreign currency assets, the actual dollars RBI can deploy, fell $14 billion in FY26.

And $5.6 billion the year before that.

Two consecutive years of FCA decline.

The only reason total reserves went up is gold prices rose sharply.
India’s reserve growth is a valuation effect.

Not an accumulation effect.

Something is moving in global credit markets that Indian investors should understand.

It is not a crisis. Not yet. But it is a signal worth reading carefully.

A thread. US junk bond funds saw $2 billion in average weekly outflows over the past month.

That is a 20x increase from the prior four weeks.

Investment grade bonds? $5.2 billion in average weekly inflows over the same period.

Same market. Opposite direction. That is not coincidence.

Everyone is focused on the rupee recovering 166 paise this week.

That is the noise.

Here is the signal nobody is talking about. India made a promise to global investors.

Bring your money in. Hedge your risk freely. Take your money out freely.

That promise attracted around $14 billion into Indian government bonds, against expectations of $20 to 25 billion after JPMorgan added India to its global index in 2024.

The promise had a name. Partial convertibility.

Todd Combs just left Berkshire Hathaway to run a $10 billion investment vehicle at JPMorgan.

That move tells you more than any market commentary this week. Combs was the leading internal candidate to manage Berkshire’s portfolio after Buffett.

He left anyway.

That is not a knock on Berkshire. It is a signal that the most interesting capital allocation opportunity right now is not in Omaha. It is in Washington adjacent industries.