Good morning, everyone. Well, this quarter is ending not with a bang but a whimper. The S&P futures are up a few hundreds of a single percentage point, and the Russell small cap futures are down by the same amount. A whole lot of nothing. The /ES has been in a very slow drift lower since yesterday’s peak.

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My fixation on the not-the-U.S. markets continues, with EFA continuing as my all-time favorite. This is looking at a weak opening bell.

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The federal and various state governments continue to grapple with surging energy prices, with the latest shot-in-the-dark being the threat to release large quantities of the nation’s strategic petroleum reserves (which, I dunno, we might want to keep safely in storage in case there’s an actual serious crisis on our own shores one day) and that is zapping crude oil prices hard.

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However, I’m pleased to see that gold was able to shake off its weakness last night and has flipped green on us.

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I’ll be glad to see this quarter-end and turn our eyes in a few weeks to earnings season, which I infinitely prefer to the random-war-news driving prices. I have a strong hunch that we’re going to witness what happened with Micron this week hundreds of times in April – – that is, earnings that are initially embraced with huge amounts of buying, only to be countered with a dawning realization that, gee, maybe things aren’t so peachy.

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Good luck today, and we finally put Q1 2022 to bed.