Bear steepener meets a bifurcated tape: quality and momentum diverge sharply.
If long rates keep climbing while consumer-facing and financial names crack, the cost of capital is doing work that valuation multiples have not yet acknowledged.
Seven of twelve sectors closed higher on April 16, led by Energy and Communication Services, with the tape's top-to-bottom dispersion reaching 2.34 points as lithium, semiconductors, and small-cap tech surged while financials, healthcare, and leisure names sold off sharply on earnings-adjacent pressure.
Since the last briefing
Yesterday the committee concluded that diplomacy was draining a war premium and that AI-infrastructure and enterprise-software leadership was the actionable posture, maintaining energy avoidance particularly in CVE and XOM at 65/35 conviction.
What drove the session and how it transmitted, the exposure table by persistence grade, where the committee disagreed, its verdict and weighting, and the falsifiers that would prove it wrong.