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“My advisers built a wall between myself and my people. I didn’t realize what was happening. When I woke up, I had lost my people.” – Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
US futures are bucking a general trend of weakness in international markets and are poised to open modestly higher. S&P 500 futures are indicated to open 0.15% higher, while the Nasdaq is looking at a gain of over 0.4%. Tech is leading the way higher as chip and memory stocks rally, while we’re seeing mixed reactions to earnings from regional banks. Treasuries are selling off as the 10-year yield pushes up near 4.2%, and crude oil is trading up over 1% to just under $60 per barrel. Metals are seeing weakness as gold is down nearly 1% while silver and platinum are down over 4%. Lastly, Bitcoin is up fractionally and above $95K, and Ether pushes up above $3,300.
Asian stocks ended the week on a mixed note but finished the week generally higher. The Nikkei fell 0.3% but finished the week up nearly 4%, while the Hang Seng was down by the same amount and finished the week 2.3% higher. China was the only outlier as the Shanghai Composite also traded down 0.3%, taking its YTD decline to 0.5%. South Korea traded 0.9% higher to close out the week (what else is new) and finished the week 5.6% higher.
Europe appears poised to close out the week on a sluggish note. The STOXX 600 is down 0.2% but still on pace for a weekly gain. France is the biggest laggard this morning as the CAC 40 drops nearly 1%, setting the stage for a weekly decline of 1.4%. The DAX is down close to 0.5% and teetering around the unchanged level for the week. December CPI in Germany was unchanged, which took the year/year rate down to 1.8%.
Getting back to the performance of South Korea, 2025 was already a strong year for the country, but it hasn’t skipped a beat so far in 2026. The chart below shows the performance of the MSCI South Korea ETF (EWY), and even after accounting for changes in the currency, it’s been a series of record highs all year.
In local currency terms, the KOSPI traded higher on all eleven trading days this year. That’s an impressive streak, but it had another streak of the same length back in September. Before that, though, you have to go back to 2019 to find a streak lasting as long or longer. In fact, that 13-day streak in September 2019 was tied with a streak in April 2019 and February 1984 for the longest on record.
Over its current eleven-day winning streak, the KOSPI has rallied 14.9%, which ranks as the best start to a year for the index over 11 trading days since 2001 (19.6%). Since 1981, there have been four other years when the KOSPI rallied more than 10% in the first eleven trading days of the year. When you think about it, it’s interesting to see how a parallel to this period for the KOSPI traces back to the period starting in 1998, which is also just where we would be based on the comparison between the Nasdaq following the launch of Chat GPT versus its performance following the launch of Netscape in the early to mid-1990s.
