Just caught up on what happened with the stock market in April and honestly the rebound is pretty interesting. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both hit new all-time highs this week, which is wild considering how much they got hit earlier in the year during the US-Iran tensions.

Tom Lee from BitMine was making some solid points about why this recovery actually signals a healthier market than we had at the previous peak in January. He broke down three reasons on CNBC that got me thinking differently about the current situation.

So the numbers first: S&P 500 closed at 7,022.95 on April 15, beating the old record from January 28. Nasdaq hit 24,016, a fresh all-time high. This comes after the S&P dropped like 9% from its January peak when everything was chaotic, but now both are positive for the year despite March's rough patch.

Tom Lee's first observation was about oil prices. Yeah, oil spiked above 100 USD per barrel after the Hormuz Strait closure, which crushed other countries' economies. But here's where it gets interesting - Lee pointed out that the US stock market is actually handling these elevated oil prices way better than expected. It's not the same weakness we'd normally see. Prices did cool down a bit as people started hoping for de-escalation, but the market didn't panic like it usually does with oil shocks.

His second point was about corporate earnings. Tom Lee noted that companies have actually seen higher profits despite the conflict, which is counterintuitive. Part of it is defense spending ramping up to around 30 billion USD monthly, potentially hitting 60 billion. That's genuinely stimulating the economy rather than dragging it down. Meanwhile, the 20 USD increase in oil prices only adds about 12 billion USD monthly burden per household. When you do the math, the war is actually supporting earnings growth.

The third thing Tom Lee emphasized was about inflation expectations. Historically, oil price spikes create huge inflationary pressure, right? But looking back at the data, core inflation actually absorbed oil volatility better than we anticipated. So the inflation shock coming might be smaller than feared.

Tom Lee is still targeting 7,300 for the S&P 500 this year, which means roughly 4% upside from current levels. That's the kind of nuance people miss when they're just looking at headlines about geopolitical chaos.