(Bloomberg) — Investors wary of being wrong-footed by twists and turns in the Iran war are trading stocks at a record pace, one market measure shows.
With investors hanging on every development in the Middle East and the often unpredictable missives of President Donald Trump, gauges of trading volume have spiked. One such metric, the daily turnover in the State Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, has breached $60 billion — a level seen as a “freak out” indicator by Bloomberg Intelligence strategists — 29 times this year. That new record compares to 28 times in all of 2025, according to BI’s Athanasios Psarofagis.
Markets were on edge again Tuesday, after Trump threatened to wipe out Iran’s “whole civilization” and continued attacks on the country’s main oil export facility, ratcheting up pressure on Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The S&P 500 Index has fallen some 5.2% from its all-time high and recently marked its worst quarter since 2022, while prices for Brent crude are up around 75% year to date.
“President Trump enjoys maximum uncertainty as a negotiating strategy, which is at odds with the market’s dislike of uncertainty,” said Sameer Samana, head of global equities and real assets at Wells Fargo Investment Institute. “We see this lasting throughout the entirety of his presidency as he negotiates and renegotiates a variety of situations and agreements and markets would be well to keep that in mind.”
Daily turnover in the SPY has breached $60B in 2026
With little letup in the news flow, the risk of fresh market-moving events hitting stocks has made it hard for traders to simply sit on the sidelines, according to BCA Research’s Doug Peta.
“Uncertainty is extremely elevated because the US could exit the conflict or significantly escalate it in the time it takes to retweet a Truth Social post and because the disparity of outcomes is so wide,” he said.
At the same time, the gyrations appear to be taking a toll on some investors, with buying from the reliably-bullish retail crowd showing signs of flagging and hedge funds bailing out of global stocks at the fastest pace in more than a decade. Dip-buyers have pulled back as well: A BI study of leveraged long ETF flows showed investors were far less inclined to buy aggressively when stocks sold off in March.
“Every time there’s some bad news, the market freaks out much more than it used to just because it’s like, ‘OK, let’s take the money and run,’” BI’s Psarofagis said.
Of course, buying on weakness has been rewarded in recent years, with markets eventually bouncing to erase declines spurred by everything from the Covid-19 pandemic to the worst inflation scare in decades. Bullish investors argue that the US economy has so far been resilient, while advances in artificial intelligence offer a powerful reason to remain positive on stocks.
Seasonality may also prove a tailwind: The S&P 500 has notched an average April gain of 1.5% since 1990, trailing only November’s 2.2% advance, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Last April turned out to be a significant dip-buying opportunity, with markets tumbling on tariff fears only to roar back in the following months.
Down days could provide “some interesting entry points,” Psarofagis said. “Last year during tariffs, that was a really great buying opportunity, if you wanted to stomach it.”
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