Market news & insights

Here is the situation as April begins. A war is affecting one of the world's most important oil chokepoints. Brent crude is trading above US$100. And the Federal Reserve (Fed), which spent much of 2025 engineering a soft landing, is now facing an inflation threat driven less by wages, services or the domestic economy, and more by energy. It is watching an oil shock.

With the Iran conflict reshaping energy markets, central banks turning hawkish, and gold in freefall despite the chaos, the safe haven playbook in 2026 is more complicated than ever. 

If you've spent any time looking at a trading terminal, you've seen it. A news headline breaks, a chart line snaps, and suddenly everyone is rushing for the same exit or the same entrance. It looks like chaos. In practice, it is often a chain of mechanical responses.

So, here’s the thing...If you have been following the tech story for the last decade, you have been trained to look at a very specific, very small patch of real estate in Northern California. But as we sit here in early 2026, the "connect-the-dots" moment for investors is this: the AI trade has stopped being about shiny software demos in Palo Alto and has started being about the physical industrialisation of compute.

Few institutions shape everyday Australian life as quietly, or as powerfully, as the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA).

2026 is not giving investors much breathing room. It seems markets may have largely moved past the idea that rate cuts are just around the corner and into a year where inflation may prove harder to control than many expected.