Is The Iran-US Deal Actually Done?! with Andreas Steno | Macro Mondays

Andreas Steno is back to break down recent market volatility, unpacking all the key drivers, from global liquidity dynamics to the evolving peace deal between the U. S. and Iran, which has seemingly opened the Strait of Hormuz. But is the deal actually done!? Today’s sponsor is Plus500 US. Take your trading to the next level with cross-market contracts, from precious metals to key indices, and more. Whether you’re a seasoned trader in the Futures arena or brand new, Plus500’s user-friendly trading platform offers you the advanced tools, market insights, and quick execution you’ve been looking for. Get started with Plus500 for as little as $100 at https://us.plus500.com. Trading in futures involves the risk of loss. 00:07 - US-Iran Deal Nears: What It Means for Markets 02:00 - Inside the 60-Day Iran Deal and Strait of Hormuz Reopening 04:37 - Oil Market Surplus: Why Crude Could Fall Below $70 08:02 - Iran Sanctions Lifted: The New Supply Shock for Global Oil 10:56 - ECB Rate Hike Timing Looks Worse After Hormuz Breakthrough 13:17 - Anthropic Export Curbs: Why AI Models Are Becoming Too Big to Fail 17:51 - SpaceX IPO Surge and What It Says About Risk Appetite 19:55 - IPO Boom, Liquidity, and Why This Cycle May Have Further to Run 21:08 - AI Token Pricing, OpenAI, and Anthropic Ahead of IPO Season 22:45 - South Korea Exports, Semiconductors, and the Next Leg of the AI Trade 🔥 Get 𝗙𝗥𝗘𝗘 𝗔𝗖𝗖𝗘𝗦𝗦 to Real Vision https://rvtv.io/3YOZZUe Connect with Real Vision™ Online:YouTube: youtube.com/@RealVisionFinanceTwitter: https://rvtv.io/twitterInstagram: https://rvtv.io/instagramWebsite: https://rvtv.io/3Y4t5PwDisclaimer: https://media.realvision.com/wp/20231004185303/Disclaimer-1.pdf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Hello everyone and welcome to Macro Mondays here at Real Vision. I'm Andres Thiel and I'm all by myself this week as my co-host Niko is on vacation in Italy. And the wifi is not super strong in Tuscany where he is right now, so we'll try and make it without him this week, even though it's a big geopolitical week with the deal between the US and Iran. Remember that this is our sneak peek into our macro research at Real Vision. This is our weekly free show out every Monday, but we also publish both a macro editorial every Monday, a geopolitical editorial every Red and Stay and a portfolio editorial every Friday.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  And I doubled down on my risk positive tilt in the portfolio last week, but if you want to check the exact single names in the portfolio, you need a pro-subscription at Real Vision. It's been a great year for the stock portfolio and, well, the stocks are flying again today with this deal between the US and Iran. It was a very, very eventful weekend, to say the least, given this deal that at some point during Sunday looked like it was ready to be signed already yesterday. We now know that the signing ceremony is planned for later this week in Switzerland.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  But let's see whether there will be any hiccups between now and then. On Sunday, we obviously had an Israeli attempt to sort of derail this signing ceremony that was otherwise probably going ahead yesterday with an attack at Lebanon. And we obviously don't know whether we will see hiccups before this signing ceremony. We've obviously heard that the deal is done before, but the big change this time around is that all parties agree. So I consider it more or less a done deal, but what's actually in the deal? Maybe we should start with a discussion on that. What we do know in terms of this memorandum of understanding between the parties is that... It covers the next sixty days.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  So the intention is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to allow the shipping transit to resume. And on top of that, also allow Iran to sell its oil globally without sanctions, at least for the next sixty days. What happens after those sixty days is dependent on how the negotiations they unfold from here. Let me put it like that. We do not have a clear understanding between the parties on the uranium question yet.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  We do have a phrase, as far as I'm concerned, surrounding nuclear weapons. But the enriched uranium is still up in the air. And whether the US will be able to get it out is one of the questions that we still do not know the full details around. We've seen a few of the hawks within the US administration citing some concerns around this. Lindsey Graham is one example of it. He explicitly refers to J D Vance and his negotiation team. And he wants them to ask Congress when they settle on the deal surrounding the enriched uranium.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  So therefore, I mean, we do have some clarity for the next sixty days, but we do not have clarity years ahead. If you ever get that in the Middle East, that is. But in my opinion, this is another example of what I've earlier labeled sequential progress in this question. I actually think that from a market standpoint, we've basically been past the peak of this crisis since the first week of April. I explicitly stated that the crisis was over from an investment perspective in the first week of April, which proved to be incredibly correct. The question is now whether we could see any hiccups in oil space now that we're at least on a path towards reopening the Strait of Hormuz again.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  So let's look at the details of the current oil market and whether we're actually in a surplus from a demand, sorry, supply to demand perspective, which in my opinion is the case now. And I've actually held that view for a while. If you look at the chart on page four here on. The sort of decomposition of the oil flows out of the region since the crisis started, out of the 20 million barrels that typically left the region on a daily basis. Roughly, say, eleven and a half of those were replaced by alternative measures. Another couple of million barrels, as you can see from the right-hand bar,

• 5:05Speaker 00

  were replaced by extraordinary exports from the US, both from the SPR but also from other commercial reserves. And then, maybe most importantly, in light green, China has been on a bias strike, basically since the latter parts of March, importing, say, between friends, five and a half million barrels less a day, which is a lot. So China and the US, in cooperation, have managed to roughly balance the market. And on top of that, which is basically the news since last week, the US administration is now bragging that they've managed to sneak out roughly 3 million barrels a day

• 5:44Speaker 00

  from the Persian Gulf via this Operation Freedom that was launched, I think it was in the first week of May. Peter Hexett said that more than 125 million barrels had left the Strait of Hormuz since the launch of Operation Freedom. And if you calculate the daily flow, that's roughly 3 million barrels, a little bit more than 3 million barrels. And those were roughly unaccounted for by most of the energy pundits. I laid out the thesis during the latter parts of April and the early parts of May that both sides, both the Iranians and the American administration, had an incentive to hide this

• 6:26Speaker 00

  since the Iranians managed to sneak out oil along the coastline to India and Pakistan because the US blockade couldn't really interfere in territorial waters. And therefore, they could sneak out some oil along that coastline, while the Americans also sneaked out oil via escorts from some of the warships. And the Iranians obviously couldn't admit to that because that would... Showcase that they didn't really have the leverage over the strength that they claimed to have, and the Americans obviously couldn't admit to the oil being sneaked out by the Iranians, because that would also be the same as admitting to the blockade not really being efficient. So I actually think that by now, we roughly know that that thesis was correct,

• 7:12Speaker 00

  that we did see more flows coming out of the region than what was reported. And therefore, by the end of the day, we've probably been in a mild surplus if we include this import drawdown in China since early April. And that's basically why we've seen falling oil prices, even though every single energy pundit has told you the exact opposite. We've been on the right side of this due to this very cynical thesis that I laid out. What if we look ahead? I mean, obviously, over the next 60 days, we don't really have any sanctions on Iranian oil. That's not a given going forward, but for the next 60 days, we don't have that. If we assume that the Iranian regime will be allowed to export oil without

• 7:57Speaker 00

  any sanctions globally, is that a potential addition to the global supply? Let's have a look at page five here, where we look at the Iranian production and the overall capacity of the Iranian oil sector. And we're talking about a meaningful addition in the case that Iran is allowed to export globally without any sanctions. Obviously, now we have a drawdown in the actual production, since some of it has been shut in due to the US blockade. But we're talking close to 4 million barrels a day at max, and we know that the Iranian oil production roughly had those levels a day back in, say, 2005 to 2008, ahead of

• 8:40Speaker 00

  the Great Financial Crisis. So we should be able to get back to roughly such levels, which is on top of where we were ahead of the war, an addition of, say, 0.75 million barrels a day or something like that. So there is a potential add-on source to global supply here if sanctions are lifted on Iran. Again, let me stress, we only know that sanctions are lifted for the next 60 days. But it comes on top of the tectonic shifts that we've seen in the oil market, essentially since the outset of this war. Amidst this war, remember that the United Arab Emirates left the OPEC plus group.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Meaning that even the Arabs cannot agree on the direction of travel on the supply management strategy within the OPEC now. And OPEC is basically a Saudi Arabia plus group now, meaning that Saudi Arabia is on its own in terms of trying to impact the supply and price dynamics of the global oil market. I'm of the view that we may get a race to the bottom now in the oil price, since many of these producers will have an incentive to increase supply as much as they can in a scenario where the oil price is on a slippery slope. And it remains to be seen whether China will increase its buying, its imports of oil again

• 10:07Speaker 00

  in the case of reopening of the strait. But typically, China takes a very trading oriented approach to that. So they typically fill up their storages when they see a bottom forming in the oil market. And I don't think we're there yet, so I think they'll be patient and they'll probably try and wait and see to see whether they can buy new storages at lower prices. And yeah, if you look at the current surplus, which is probably, say, between one and a half and two million barrels a day, again, included this buyer strike from China. We're talking about a meaningful supply surplus that should bring oil prices below $70 a barrel by the end of this month or this.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  So I think it's a very, very benign development from an inflation perspective.

• 10:56Speaker 01

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• 11:13Speaker 00

  And in light of that.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  Let me throw some garbage at the European Central Bank. Because they hiked interest rates last week, citing concerns around second order effects on inflation and so on and so forth. But I'd also like to point your attention to a detail from their projections going forward, both on growth and on inflation. So they hiked interest rates more or less 24 hours before we found a resolution in the Strait of Amos, which is hilarious timing in itself. But they also see a very strong growth picture and a very high inflation picture for the rest of the year in the eurozone. They see a growth that totals 0.8 over the year for the entirety of 2026,

• 12:03Speaker 00

  even though we had a negative first quarter growth in the eurozone. So if you look at page six, I basically just, on the back of a napkin, calculated the needed quarterly growth page pays for the European Central Bank to match its projections on growth. And as you can see from the chart here, we basically need three quarters of roughly 0.5% growth to get to the assumptions made by the European Central Bank just last week on growth. I'll take the under on those assumptions any day, and I'll also take the under on those inflation assumptions

• 12:48Speaker 00

  that kind of follow this growth dynamic that they pencil in. So as per usual, I think the European Central Bank has had a very bad timing in its policy decision here. And it will be very interesting to see how Kevin Walsh addresses this now, because in the Fed, obviously, because I think he's got a pretty decent window of opportunity to try and sound dovish here. I've said that all month. And I mean, now that we have a resolution, that we have prices from the Strait of Amos in freefall, we already had that before the resolution this weekend, but it's even more so the case now. I think central banks will have to abandon their inflation alarmism.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  The European Central Bank with a very odd timing last week. I hope that the Federal Reserve does not repeat that. Interesting, even though we seem to have found a resolution for the Strait of Amos, I'm not jinxing it, but it was kind of the second most important news of the weekend, which is almost as bizarre as it gets, because we obviously got those export curbs implemented on Anthropic's Fable model, was it Late Friday European Alice? And I don't think I've ever seen anything like it on a software product.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  You know, the US administration basically told Anthropic to curb access to the Fable model for everyone outside of the US. And as far as I'm concerned, this is basically the Mythos model with guardrails, and some of those guardrails were exposed by a developer team at Amazon. And probably Jeff Bezos told the Trump administration, hey, guys, the guardrails, they're not really guardrails. And therefore, the Trump administration told Anthropic to either curb exports or fix those things.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  And since they weren't immediately fixable, apparently Anthropic didn't want to fix them, the model is now offline. A couple of things here. You know, first of all, at least on the surface, I saw a lot of takes on this being negative for the total addressable market size of Anthropic, because this kind of showcases that we really cannot provide users, say, in Russia, China, or any country linked to any of these countries, with access to the best model on earth. Having said that, so you can argue that it limits the upside.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Having said that, this is also a crystal-clear example of this being an arms race between superpowers, right? We know that China is actively funding some of the bigger LLMs in China. Maybe the US will actively start funding some of the companies in the US soon. But at the very least, I consider this... A moralist statement that these models have become too big to fail. Because this is ultimately a race towards AGI, a race towards winning that competition on a sovereign scale. And therefore, it is highly unlikely that the financing concerns that we've had around

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Anthropic and OpenAI, mostly around OpenAI, obviously, that those financing concerns are really something you should care about, given that the public sector will likely be involved or get involved, should push come to shove here. So, in my opinion, this export curve and the statement that followed both decreased the right-hand tail of the distribution of outcomes, maybe the, you know, ultimate, total addressable market size went down as a consequence of this export curve. But it also took away a lot of the risk of a left-tail scenario here, because we're probably talking about models that are too big to fail by now.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  And therefore, if you look at, you know, the combined projection going forward for revenues

• 17:07Speaker 00

  from Anthropic and OpenAI, I just did a hypothetical example. I think the red scenario is basically what's in play now compared to the light blue scenario, which also contained some adverse scenarios before this statement. And by the end of the day, I think this has been news for these half-glass, empty types that typically recite many of the portfolio manager positions around the world. Because they've been very scared of the left tail with this extremely expansionist build-out. While if the government is effectively, you know, providing a put,

• 17:47Speaker 00

  then obviously the left tail is not as scary as it was. So therefore... You know, even though the outcome space has been contained here, I actually think that it's net net a positive. Uh, and I'm yet to hear others really saying the same. So um, let's see how the market um. Prices this over the uh coming quarter or two. We we obviously know that both companies are looking into IPOs in October. Um, so will be very interesting to follow. And speaking of IPOs, um. Basically, the third most important news was the biggest IPO of all time on Friday. Which again goes to show how crazy weekend this has been. Uh SpaceX did well on Friday. Um.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  And uh if we look at at um the IPO pricing, it was obviously very oversubscribed. Um. Uh SpaceX did a fifteen twenty percent um increase. Uh on on Friday, and we're now seeing uh live levels closer to one seventy five, right? So uh it it um uh it's a great start. To to the SpaceX journey uh on um on NASDAQ. And. Uh remember that SpaceX will be included uh in the NASDAQ one hundred in thirteen names from now, if I'm not mistaken. So we do have these passive flows uh into SpaceX upcoming still.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Uh and my thesis has basically been um into this IPO that we would have, you know, almost melt up like a price action in SpaceX until the end of the month. And then I'm. Uh a lot that's certain around the direction of travel in SpaceX from first of July onwards roughly. Uh and I still hold that view after what I've watched uh for the past um about forty eight hours or so here. Um having said that, I don't own any SpaceX stocks. Um not really tempted because I I consider the price action very uh tricky to navigate uh right after an IPO. Uh but I um I think the price action is um. Another example of great appetite for for growth stocks, and I think it's another example.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Of a better liquidity picture uh than feared by uh by many. And that's. Probably what I wanted to discuss as as the final um topic of the day. Because. SpaceX uh obviously um.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, attempted to raise seventy five billion dollars and managed to do so on Friday. And we know that Anthropic and OpenAI will IPO in the fourth quarter, most likely. So in total, we're talking about IPO proceeds that will, yeah, far exceed one hundred billion dollars among the three. If we look at total IPO proceeds this year, we'll probably reach three hundred billion, something like that. Which is, you know, a lot, also in historical context. But it's actually not a lot if you look at it in a relative context, because, I mean, even though it's obviously nominally the biggest IPO ever.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  You obviously need to, you know, to account for the basement, the inflation that we've seen since, you know, over the past decades, et cetera. And if you look at it as a relative size versus the market cap, for example, we're talking overall-ish four percent this IPO season of market cap. I think the dot com IPO season peaked at plus ten. So is it an extreme IPO season? Sure. Is it a record high? No way, not even near. And to me, it more looks like the year that comes before the, you know, the final year of the cycle. When you look at the IPO dynamics here, it can get crazier than this. In other words.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  I've had a lot of discussions ahead of the IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI around the token pricing. Most of you will know that I've referred to the Silicon Data Index on the token pricing over the course of the past weeks, since we've seen a tendency towards using marginally cheaper tokens, let me put it like that, over the past weeks. And we've obviously seen a load of blue chips communicating that they've rained in spending on Claude. Uber is an example, Microsoft, another example. And what we've seen is that the marginal activity has likely moved slightly towards other models.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  So. I could be a little worried that we do see marginal activity moving towards cheaper models ahead of these IPOs. And you know, I'm just thinking out loud here, I'm not overly tempted to join these IPOs either. At least not now. I'm still much more in the trade of all of the hardware companies delivering to the company's spending. So you know, everything from memory to to power semis, et cetera. And that's the chart I want to conclude this week's Macro Mondays with, because we did get the trade data from South Korea on page eight

• 23:00Speaker 00

  for the first 10 days of the month, late last week, and even though we do see some you know,

• 23:10Speaker 00

  workday changes relative to the first 10 days of June in 2025, we're still talking about a growth of almost 90% year-over-year in the South Korean exports on page eight.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  I do know that if you work day adjust this, you probably get something that is slightly less dramatic, but look at it versus the Vanex Semiconductor ETF here, which basically tracks the semiconductor index. I think we have heydays ahead in semiconductors still. And if you want to check my portfolio of semiconductor stocks and the other tradable themes that I have in my portfolio, you need a pro subscription at Real Vision. But yeah, even though we've seen the biggest IPO nominally in history on Friday, I still think there is money left for a rally here. The liquidity situation looks pretty decent until August. And yeah, the inflation alarmists were proven wrong.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Once again, let's see how the oil market develops from here. It very much depends on whether China will start buying again. But at least for now, we're in a surplus in the oil market, which basically no one but but us told you a couple of months ago. Thank you for watching this week's Macro Mondays. I'll probably be on my own next Monday as well, since Michael is still in Italy. But I hope you enjoyed this solo version of the show and please leave your comments and feedback in the section below the show here and I'll see you next week.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com/join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha, great investment ideas and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future. So get started now. Go to realvision.com/join.