Mon-T Weekly Review — w/e 24 Apr 2026

There is no gentle way to open this review, so I will not attempt one. One correct directional call from eight. Twelve and a half percent. The worst week the desk has ever produced, and by a margin so wide it makes the prior low point, that 46.7% horror show during the first Iran war week in March, look like a triumph of analytical excellence.

The damage is spread across every sector. Silver, this week's Market of the Week and the desk's old favourite from those heady February days when it seemed the metal could do no wrong, was called BULLISH at 7/10 conviction and promptly collapsed 7.4% from $81.84 to $75.79. Gold, BULLISH at 6/10, fell 3.24%. Copper, BULLISH at 6/10, lost 1.37%. Platinum, BULLISH at 6/10, cratered 4.99%. The entire precious metals and industrial complex was called bullish, and every single one went down. Then there is crude oil, called BEARISH at 6/10, which surged 13% as Iran seized ships in the Strait of Hormuz shortly after Trump extended the ceasefire, sending Brent briefly above $100 again. CNBC ran a timeline piece titled 'How the Iran war shook oil prices' on April 21, and the desk was on precisely the wrong side of every sentence in it.

The sole directional win was the Russell 2000, BULLISH at 7/10, which gained 3% to reach a fresh all-time high at 2794.6. One correct call from eight. The desk's seven NO CALL markets produced four correct abstentions and three misses, including the Nasdaq's continued 2.16% rally that I have now called out five times this year. The scorecard is ugly. The commentary will be honest. That is the deal.

Eight directional calls this week, with one landing on the right side. The other seven markets got the NO CALL treatment. A 12.5% directional hit rate is not just the worst week on record. It is the kind of number that forces you to ask whether the analytical framework has fundamentally broken or whether this was a confluence of bad luck and bad timing.

The confidence calibration makes it worse. The two highest-conviction calls, Silver at 7/10 and the Russell at 7/10, produced the week's starkest divergence: silver collapsed 7.4% while RTY rallied 3%. The other six directional calls all sat at 6/10, a zone of measured conviction, and every one missed. When you issue six calls at moderate confidence and all six go the wrong way, the system is either systematically wrong about the current regime or has been caught on the wrong side of a macro shift it failed to detect. This week, it was both. The Iran ceasefire that the desk assumed would continue unwinding geopolitical premium instead reignited it when Iran seized two ships in the Strait of Hormuz on the April 22 deadline, sending oil surging and dragging precious metals and commodity currencies in the opposite direction to the desk's positioning.

The rolling twelve-week figure sits at 62.6% across 107 directional calls, with 73 no-call abstentions. This week's 12.5% will drag the rolling number down significantly when next week's calculation runs. The desk had been quietly building toward the 60% ceiling for weeks, and this single catastrophic scorecard threatens to undo all that progress. The engagement rate shows the desk calling direction on roughly 59% of market-weeks, which reflects the wartime caution that has defined 2026. Strip out this week's results and the rolling figure looks healthy. Include them, and the December scars reopen.

There is no polishing this. The Fundamental agent, which carries the heaviest weighting across most commodity and metals markets at 25-35%, drove bullish calls on silver, gold, copper, and platinum that all missed. Its supply-deficit and structural-demand frameworks, which powered the desk's February glory run, have now been wrong across the board for a second time when the Iran conflict reignited. The lesson from the w/e 6 Mar review, when I wrote that 'the Fundamental agent needs a macro override switch for wartime conditions,' has still not been learned. Ten weeks later, the same agent is still calling bullish on precious metals during active Hormuz disruptions.

The Sentiment agent was the week's standout performer, despite carrying the lightest weighting. Its contrarian warning about euphoric retail positioning in silver, its greed reading on equities, and its bullish RTY signal were all directionally correct. When your lowest-weighted discipline outperforms your highest-weighted one for the third time during a wartime regime, the weighting system needs more than a tweak. It needs a conversation about whether structural supply-demand analysis deserves 30% allocation when a shooting war is actively repricing every asset on the board.

The BoJ decision on April 25 lands on Friday, creating immediate binary risk for the yen. The April 28-29 FOMC and April 30 BoE and ECB meetings form a wall of central bank catalysts that should force the desk off the sidelines on FX pairs it has been avoiding for months. Q1 earnings season continues with peak tech reporting. The Iran ceasefire, now extended but complicated by the Hormuz ship seizures, remains the macro variable that keeps overriding every other thesis on the board. The desk will have its Sunday views. Given this week's catastrophe, I expect significant recalibration. Whether that recalibration takes the form of reduced conviction, more NO CALLs, or a genuine framework revision is the question subscribers should be watching for.