The Five Major Expectation Gaps Behind the Nasdaq’s Ten-Week Rally

Core Judgment: The market’s current trading of “peaceful expectations + the earnings season” may be overly optimistic. The Nasdaq’s ten-week rally is driven more by position replenishment than by an improvement in macro fundamentals. With energy at elevated levels, interest rate swings, and the lagged effects of the credit cycle, valuations will eventually revert. Below are the five key expectation gaps:

1. Iran Blockade: The market misjudges the “degree of blockage”

· Mainstream Narrative: Focus is on whether ships pass through the strait, forming a binary judgment of “effective/ineffective.”
· Expectation Gap: The truly critical factor is “circulation efficiency.” Even if ships pass, behaviors such as detouring, changing ports, and re-insuring have already compressed effective supply, creating ongoing friction costs.
· Potential Impact: Structural differentiation will emerge in the energy and chemical supply chains. Overall prices may appear steady, but regional price spreads and the term structure may keep tugging back and forth. On the foreign exchange front, higher trade settlement costs will affect currency risk premiums for sensitive economies.

2. US-Iran Negotiations: The market misreads “willingness to talk” as “risk resolved”

· Mainstream Narrative: Negotiation hopes rise, the market “de-risks,” US stocks rally, and oil prices fall.
· Expectation Gap: The core disagreements in the negotiations (nuclear facilities, the reopening of the strait, etc.) have not been resolved. The stock market’s rise carries a strong technical tone (short-covering). Although energy prices have pulled back, they are still significantly higher than at the start of the year, and the lagged effects have yet to show up.
· Potential Impact: The core of equity index futures will shift to whether earnings can cover rising costs. Gold and other precious metals—ignored as tail-risk insurance—once markets realize that risk is merely being delayed, their pricing may become crowded.

3. Nasdaq’s Ten-Week Rally: Ignores the “shadow script” of the central bank and the IMF

· Mainstream Narrative: The market votes for “peace + earnings,” and the atmosphere for risk assets is upbeat.
· Expectation Gap: Two mismatches. First, stock markets have “already priced in,” ignoring the second-round transmission of energy costs to inflation. Second, treating large banks’ trading income (arising from volatility) as a sign of economic health is not the case. The tech sector’s duration characteristic makes it extremely sensitive to rates reverting.
· Potential Impact: The structure facing the Nasdaq is that the “more smoothly it rises, the more it fears interest rates.” The yield curve will swing between growth concerns (downward) and the second-round effect of inflation (upward), lifting the discount-rate anchor for the entire market.

4. Big Bank Earnings: Underestimates the “late-arriving damage” of the credit cycle

· Mainstream Narrative: Earnings look impressive; the economy has resilience; private credit risks are only “forward-looking warnings.”
· Expectation Gap: Once credit problems occur, they often come as sudden about-faces with non-linear characteristics. Private credit has low transparency and valuation lag; risks will only transmit to the broader market after spreading from peripheral assets.
· Potential Impact: Credit spreads will widen, and the market’s focus will shift from “earnings are good” to “balance sheet first.” Nominal yields may not surge much, but rising credit compensation will squeeze high-valuation sectors.

5. Federal Reserve Nomination: The market ignores the “institutional friction premium”

· Mainstream Narrative: Focus is on whether the nominee’s huge holdings are compliant and credible.
· Expectation Gap: This is not gossip—it is the cost of institutional friction. Central bank credibility itself is an asset. As future policy communication noise rises, it will be embedded into an uncertainty premium.
· Potential Impact: Interest rate volatility is underestimated. The foreign exchange market may reflect the institutional premium earlier, and cross-border capital will demand higher risk compensation.

Summary: In the short term, the market is driven by positioning and sentiment, but the “shadow script” created by energy costs, the credit cycle, and policy uncertainty has yet to be turned to the next page. Investors need to be alert to a style shift from “upgrading earnings from trading” to “downgrading valuations from trading.”
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