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Betting On The Iran War Winding Down

Portfolio Armor's Photo
by Portfolio Armor
Wednesday, Mar 25, 2026 - 9:39

A wide, cinematic financial illustration showing fear beginning to recede from a geopolitical crisis.

Adding Bullish Exposure—And Fading Fear

In yesterday’s trade alert, we noted our view that the Iran war is more likely to be resolved sooner rather than later.

News that broke after we published that alert only reinforced that view. President Trump said his negotiators had received what he described as a significant “gift” from their interlocutor, reports circulated that a 30-day ceasefire is being discussed while a broader 15-point peace plan is debated, and markets initially rallied on those headlines before turning more cautious again as Iran publicly denied direct talks were underway. In other words, the path still looks messy—but the direction still looks more like negotiation than endless escalation.

That fits the broader pattern we’ve been talking about throughout the Iran war. We hedged against the risk of this conflict before it started, using a VIX options trade in our February 18th alert.

Today, we’re reversing tack: using a new options structure on VIX to bet that, over the next several weeks, the fear premium comes down as this war winds toward a settlement. At the same time, we’re also looking to add long exposure with bullish trades on three stocks—two from Portfolio Armor’s Top Names and one from our Market Watchers / Chartmill workflow (we bookmark interesting ideas from our Market Watchers X list, and add alerts to them on Chartmill to let us know when they pass our technical screens).

Four Trades For A Less Panicked Market

As regular readers know, Portfolio Armor’s Top Names have more than doubled the average performance of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust ETF (SPY 0.00%↑) since December of 2022.

The three stocks we’re trading alongside the VIX setup are all different kinds of picks-and-shovels names. One is a South Korea ETF that functions in large part as a proxy for the AI memory buildout through its heavy exposure to Samsung and SK hynix. Another is a uranium producer positioned for the longer-term nuclear buildout theme. And the third is a Market Watchers name we first bookmarked from an X post before later getting a Chartmill alert on it—a company whose burn-in and stress-test systems sit underneath the silicon-photonics and optical-I/O stack that AI data centers increasingly depend on.

If you'd like a heads up in real time when we place these trades, you can sign up for our trading Substack/occasional email list below.

And if you think we're wrong about the war winding down, and you want to hedge against it getting worse, you can use our website or iPhone app to scan for the optimal hedges for that. 

Contributor posts published on Zero Hedge do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Zero Hedge, and are not selected, edited or screened by Zero Hedge editors.
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