Market Insights Recap — Week of March 9, 2026

Hello. I'm Steve Orr, Chief Investment Officer for Texas Capital's Private Bank.

Three things this week. Another week of reality versus noise, early vacation for stocks and the jobs market.

Let's have a quick perspective on the Iran conflict. Now depending on how you count, this is the fourth or fifth time where radical Islam and the West have fought each other. These eras seem to occur about every 150 to 200 years. And the last time our sailors and merchant men were being attacked at sea, Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Continental Congress to request a navy. And that's how our Marines got the shores of Tripoli in their song. Now, in each of these eras, the West took about 40 years to come to terms with the threat. Here, we're at 47 years. So we expect there's going to be some change in Iran's status over about the next six weeks or so.

In the meantime, crude oil prices are about 60% higher than they were at the end of last year. Global events rattle markets, but they rarely change the long-term trend. For stocks, the long-term trend is still bullish. Now short-term, those war fears are still rattling Mr. Market's cage. The S&P 500, down about 2% this year. Nasdaq, down about 3.5%. Looking all the way back to Halloween, the big indexes have gone nowhere while small cap, international and value, those stocks have rotated into the driver's seat. Think of this guideway consolidation as a vacation from the bull, not a trend change to a bear. A bear breakdown would start with a prolonged war, and your first clue would be Treasury bond yields dropping, signaling slower growth ahead. We're nowhere near that right now. 

But what is slow? Well, looks like the job market is pretty slow. Now last Friday, there was a very negative job report that really surprised a lot of people. Wall Street thought that jobs were going to grow around 50,000 net new jobs. Instead, -92,000, real ugly headline print. Well, you kind of dig into the details there. We had a big nurses strike on the East Coast. There were over 220,000 people that reported they couldn't get to work. Remember those big storms during that period? 

So mixing everything together, we see that the average job growth has probably been around 20,000 new jobs per month the last several months. Not too hot, not too cold. And if we were really concerned about job losses, we would see rising jobless claims every Thursday. They're near cycle lows at 213,000. We would see lots more layoff announcements across a wide range of industries. I don't see that either. So a little bit of noise there from jobs, but the economy's doing just fine. It's just slow growth and really looking ahead to the Fed meeting at the end of the month, there's nothing for them to do. 

Now, they are going to have some conversations about inflation. CPI comes out this week. Consumer prices, a big chunk of that headline is gasoline prices. I think we all know these last few days, gas prices jumped up. I can tell you, driving down Texas from Dallas to Austin and back this weekend, it seems like everybody got on the phone from Exxon to QT, all these different places. Everybody was $3.19, whereas, say, Thursday, it was $2.79. Quite a jump. I was impressed. And when the BLS folks go to set inflation next month, those higher gasoline prices are going to feed into the number; it's going to come out and make Wall Street very nervous. So just know what we care about is longer-term inflation. Two years out we can see some forces building, a year out we can see forces building. We're kind of in a little bit of a low right now. And we're going to jump up next month a little bit with gasoline prices. But we're still kind of in this 2.5 to 3% range.

So just know those headlines are in your future but also in your future, the administration seems to think a couple of weeks, we think about six weeks or so, you're going to see some sort of accord on Iran and a lot more oil, not just the Iranian oil, but a lot of other countries' oil, is going to be flowing out of the Strait of Hormuz. And those oil prices are going to come down. And we think this is all going to look back in a few months here at a very nice buying opportunity in the context of an economy that's still going to grow around 3% this year; 'til next time.