The United States will continue technical talks with Iran despite Trump announcing the ceasefire was over. This is like your girlfriend saying she needs space but still wants to meet Tuesday to discuss the relationship. One of these statements negates the other.
The ceasefire signed last month lasted approximately three weeks before U.S. and Iranian forces spent consecutive days this week reminding each other what the opposite of a ceasefire looks like. Bombs were exchanged. Attacks happened. The whole stopping-the-violence thing did not occur. But technical talks will continue, because apparently that's a separate track that runs independent of whether anyone is actually honoring the ceasefire or declaring it deceased.
Retail traders who went long on defense contractors after Trump said it was over are now wondering if they should have waited for the technical talks update. They should not have done either. They should have bought an index fund in 2019 and stopped checking their brokerage app. But instead they're refreshing Reuters every forty seconds trying to parse whether "technical talks continuing" means Raytheon goes up or down tomorrow.
The phrase technical talks is doing heavy lifting here. It suggests progress. It implies diplomacy. It sounds like two engineers in a conference room solving a bandwidth problem. What it actually means is that after days of trading attacks, someone scheduled another Zoom call. The ceasefire is over, except for the part where we keep talking about having a ceasefire, which is technically still happening.
Trump says one thing. The State Department does another. Iran shoots at something. The U.S. shoots back. And through it all, technical talks persist like a quarterly earnings call nobody wants to attend but everyone is contractually obligated to join. None of this will move your portfolio in any predictable direction, but it will give CNBC something to scroll across the bottom of the screen while Jim Cramer screams about a semiconductor stock you've never heard of.
The ceasefire is over, long live the technical talks, and your stop-loss just got triggered again.
Photo by Saifee Art on Unsplash
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