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“At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.” – Alan Turing

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We can all give good rationalizations of why futures have seen such a muted reaction to the Iran news over the weekend, but isn’t that the way hindsight always works?  If you had asked anybody to predict how markets would react to a US bombing of targets in Iran, no one would have said a gain of less than 1% in crude oil and no change in S&P 500 futures.

This morning’s muted reaction to the weekend’s events is also a microcosm of the market’s YTD performance. Heading into the final week of the first half, there has been no shortage of market catalysts and subsequent volatility, but here we are with the S&P 500 little changed (up less than 1.5%) on the year. Since WWII, 2025 ranks as just the 12th time (out of 81) that the S&P 500 has been up or down less than 2% heading into the final week of the first half.

The chart below shows the S&P 500’s performance during the last week of the first half in each year since 1945. Overall, the median performance has been a decline of 0.13%, with positive returns just 51% of the time, so it hasn’t typically been a positive week for stocks. More recently, performance has been even weaker with negative returns in nine of the last eleven years and a median decline of 0.29%.