Nutstuff 3mins here…

45 years of US–Iran hostility did not begin with a tweet, nor will it end with one; it is the slow grind of revolution meeting empire, proxy meeting aircraft carrier, sanction meeting smuggler. From the hostages in 1979 to Beirut ’83, from Khobar to the Iraq insurgency, from JCPOA paperwork to Soleimani’s funeral procession, each administration has tried a different lever, absorb, retaliate, contain, sanction, escalate and none has produced finality because there is no clean “finish” to a structural rivalry. Iran cannot defeat the United States conventionally; the United States cannot remake Iran cheaply; so the contest lives in the grey zone: insurance markets, militias, shipping lanes, enrichment percentages, election cycles. Hormuz, in that sense, is less a battlefield than a mirror, it reflects how entangled the real world is. Twenty million barrels a day is not an abstraction; it is diesel for Indian buses, feedstock for Korean petrochemicals, jet fuel for European holidays, fertiliser for African crops. Three-quarters of humanity lives east of Istanbul and feels the price before Washington does. That is why closing a strait is about Insurers actuarial tables before it is about frigates. The investable conclusion follows the history: own what survives prolonged uncertainty rather than betting on decisive victory. Swiss Francs & Energy cashflows over narratives. Defence order books over campaign slogans. Gold & Silver over promises. Maybe now USDC & Zcash for “get my money the hell out”. Selective duration as shock absorber. Avoid balance sheets that assume permanently cheap freight and permanently calm seas. This is not a weekend trade; it is a reminder that geopolitics compounds, and that in the Middle East invoices are paid in spreads, barrels and credibility never in speeches!

“ dubai and abu dhabi just HK: “ see they closed their stock markets march 2 and 3. Am guessing they don't think this is done by GLOBEX open in 6 hours...”

“ I Moved to Dubai for tax shelter and now I’m in a bomb shelter”….

Andrew Tate, not my thing but you have to admire his blitz spirit: https://x.com/cobratate/status/2027912663452291347?s=48

Dubai/UAE: a thought: Here is what matters. When France gets bombed, the French stay because it is France. When Ukraine gets bombed, Ukrainians stay because it is Ukraine.
When the UAE gets bombed, the ten million people who make up eighty eight percent of its population have a decision to make. And that decision has a very short fuse. A country where nearly nine in ten residents can leave is not a nation in the traditional sense. It is a special economic zone with a flag. The moment the value proposition inverts, the population does not resist. This is not a war of attrition. It might be a “bank run” on a country. Once of course the airport opens!


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FRONTLINE / FRO US remains a key Nutstuff posn. +70% YTD. I would absolutely add to this here.
With backdrop of everything we are seeing in and @The Straits of Hormuz.
Frontline is what happens when supply constrained capital intensive assets, and geopolitics meets operating leverage.
With Frontline, you’re not buying a tanker company; you’re buying “torque on chaos”. VLCCs printing north of $400k/day is not a spreadsheet event, it’s a system shock. Frontline has deliberately kept itself wired to spot pricing with minimal hedging, maximum sensitivity which means when rates explode, cash flow doesn’t drift higher, it actually detonates. Management’s own slide deck shows ~$12/share FCF at $200k/day and @$16 at $260k. We’ve just seen $400k. The equity market will not capitalise peak hysteria, but if even a fraction of this dislocation sticks with sanctions tightening, compliant fleet scarcity, ageing tonnage, yard bottlenecks then the earnings power is multiples of what consensus models are built for. Tankers are not compounding stories; they are regime-shift trades. The question is “how long does the chaos last?” If it lasts longer than the market thinks, $40 is not the end of the move it’s simply the middle of the rerating. ( a longer term chart is good perspective here!)

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*Reminder: Inside the Investment Minds: Macro, Markets & Opportunity*
📅 *TODAY 16:00 UK [11:00 EST]*

*Raoul Pal (Real Vision), Nick Finegold (The Fat Gladiator) and Will Nutting (Nutstuff)* will share their views on the macro landscape, market positioning and where the next opportunities may lie.

This will be an open discussion, members are encouraged to contribute directly and engage in the conversation in real time.

Given recent market turmoil, the timing couldn’t be more relevant.

Expect a candid exchange between three investors who think independently and aren’t afraid to challenge consensus.

👉 *Register:* https://luma.com/xq3o2pxi

Nutstuff Comes Alive in Switzerland - March 12, 2026
https://nutstuff.co.uk/disclaimer

Phenomenal Nutstuff alpha from my UK North Sea and Wider Energy Portfolio, also Coal and Shipping names. Now we see the Wider Geo-political Games really begin. See Putin: the Kremlin would stop sharing intelligence information with Iran, such as the precise coordinates of U.S. military assets in the Middle East, if Washington ceased supplying Ukraine with intel about Russia. Pls. In the REAL WORLD: Diesel (via my Brother!) just told you the truth before the market did. When the real economy’s fuel jumps 60% in a week, that isn’t noise, it’s the system repricing from the ground up and markets are still trading like it’s a rotation, not a regime change. What’s unfolding isn’t about Iran, or even oil, it’s about the cost of energy resetting the entire stack: capital, compute, logistics, food, everything. The crowd is still long duration dreams, but the edge is shifting hard toward constraint. The next Nutstuff lays out exactly where that flow goes and the 2nd and 3rd derivatives, and also where it breaks.

Coming Sunday/Monday:
• ⚡ Energy > Everything: why the marginal unit of power now sets all prices
• 🛢️ Oil, Coal, Uranium: the price makers vs the narrative trades
• 🚢 Shipping & Chokepoints: Hormuz isn’t closed — it’s repriced
• 🌾 Food & Fertiliser: diesel shock → agricultural inflation loop
• 💻 AI Reality Check: data centres as energy sinks, not software multiples
• 🇨🇳 China’s Edge: energy → compute → export arbitrage at scale
• 🇭🇰 Hong Kong: hated, turning, levered to capital + policy + people
• 💥 Portfolio Positioning: trim duration, add scarcity, own the constraint

And to add: WAR BABBLE: please spare us….
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/20/iran-war-hormuz-covert-special-forces-sas-sbs-seals-sea/
This whole thing of the SAS and SBS can re-open the straits of Hormuz is again all too typical from Battle comic reader and Journalist Hamish “made up second name”, and reads like a retired Colonel’s commando fantasy scribbled over a few glasses of whisky 🥃, all dagger flashes and derring-do but sorry, geography topography and the map, dear boy, ruins it. The Strait of Hormuz and its hinterland from Kharg Island down through a maze of islands, coves and coastline is not suited to some plucky weekend raid, it’s an oceanic sprawl the size of a small country, saturated with missiles, drones, mines and men who have spent forty years preparing precisely for this moment. To suggest that a handful of Britain’s finest might nip in and tidy it up is rather like sending the Chelsea Flower Show committee to reorganise the Somme. And the central absurdity is even richer: the “mission” is to re-open the strait which btw isn’t closed. The oil still flows, the tankers still sail; it’s simply that the price of passage has been repriced in risk, insurance, and geopolitics. In other words, it’s been dollarised in fear. Iran doesn’t need to shut the door; it merely needs to make walking through it expensive enough that the West starts arguing with itself. This isn’t a special forces problem it’s a balance sheet problem dressed in camouflage!
Put another way maybe: “Iran’s power here is not material superiority but simply narrative coherence. A weakened regime has created a believable story of control over the world’s key energy chokepoint, and that story is actually reorganising global flows more effectively.”    

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Remember Bob Dylans lyric: "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose"….(Tx Bob)
The market’s great mistake is assuming everyone optimises for prosperity; they don’t. Some regimes simply optimise for survival and will absorb extraordinary economic pain to preserve it which renders Western tools of pressure far less effective than assumed. Layer onto this a domestic backdrop of political fatigue and elite detachment, and you have a leadership vacuum at precisely the moment credibility matters most. In that world, escalation is not deterred by threats, it is invited by misreading incentives and markets are only just beginning to price that reality. You could come up with a plethora of reasons why Iran should be neutered. But Iran isn't America, just like Vietnam was not America. These “little” people don't have the same values as Americans, they don't see the world the same way, they're willing to sacrifice, just about everything, to maintain power. We've seen this over and over. Even with the Taliban. We think they're fighting by our rules. They're just not. So life is all about reading the room. And Trump it seems on almost every metric has failed to do this. I increasingly see a US administration that have no idea how the "little people" live. Nor do the billionaires.
So where does that leave us on Sunday Evening? Well, $150 oil is very possible here and an S&P could get hit hard. AGAIN ask your self how much of US Mkt cap and Index weight is Energy and Commodity Price TAKERS vs the Mkt cap and index weight in Energy and Commodity Price MAKERS. Nutstuff has repeatedly said this and that Markets have spent months treating a live hand-grenade like a paperweight and now the pin’s been pulled and everyone’s suddenly rediscovering physics and indexes and most investors are on the wrong side of it. This from someone over the weekend: Consider that Dubai airport is just 70 miles from the Strait’s 21-mile wide choke point, and Emirates has resumed service despite intermittent drone strikes. Similarly, foot traffic at the Dubai Mall (the world’s largest) has returned to 95%. If a country living directly across from Iran can experience drone strikes and yet operate almost normally, you can be assured that the rest of the world will follow in short order. AJ I love your optimism! When everyone wakes up tomorrow morning I suspect the reality might be that this is not now another tidy, self-contained geopolitical wobble you can get your 28yr old AI wielding CFA qualified macro expert to run your “When to buy the dip model ”. This feels right now like a full-fat supply shock smashing straight into an already fragile, debt-saturated system. Energy infrastructure is being physically removed from the global balance sheet not repriced, not rerouted, but destroyed and that turns volatility into scarcity, and scarcity into structurally higher prices. The Strait of Hormuz isn’t “closed”, it’s selectively weaponised, Kharg hangs in the crosshairs, and LNG just lost real capacity for years, not weeks. Meanwhile central banks, still traumatised by 2022, are squinting at this like it’s demand-led inflation they can bully with rate hikes which is how you take an energy shock and metastasise it into a full-blown financial accident. This is the escalation trap in motion: no off-ramp, no adult in the room, just reflexive tit-for-tat where every move tightens the noose on growth while pushing oil, gas and freight relentlessly higher. If you don’t own the inputs energy, resources, real assets and the alternative system, you’re not investing, you’re asking to be imminently taxed by reality. On the basis of what I see right now, (and I sincerely hope I am wrong and maybe this 48hr threat is the precursor to a deal but I see very little sign) Trump therefore looks finished and the the midterms lost, a lame duck President at best , then more Epstein disclosures and full attacks on his business interests which I think will be theme from the summer. 

A reminder…
Nutstuff “Pair” of LONG HOG/ SHORT FWONK:
HOG / Harley-Davidson is the mirror image: unloved, cyclical, cash-generative and priced as if decline is inevitable. HOG trades on roughly 6–7× forward EV/EBITDA with a high-single-digit free-cash-flow yield, despite a balance sheet that has been de-risked, disciplined capital returns, and a brand that remains one of the few genuinely global cultural franchises in consumer discretionary. The bear case, ageing riders, EV confusion, lifestyle dilution is well known and already in the price. What is not priced is operating leverage in a normalising rate environment, the resilience of the core heavyweight segment, and management’s explicit shift from volume to margin, cash flow and buybacks. This is not a growth fantasy; it is really an arithmetic story. Even flat revenues support meaningful equity upside via buybacks and dividends, while any cyclical rebound in discretionary spending or modest success in adjacent segments drops straight to free cash flow. In a market that has spent years overpaying for “scarce” sporting narratives. HOG offers a contrast and something far rarer: real cash-flow, low expectations and a brand that people still actually tattoo on their bodies. That is a better risk-reward than underwriting ever-richer team prices in an increasingly crowded paddock.

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Nutstuff just landed in Africa. A reminder that it is April Fools day today, and as the adage goes “there’s no fool like an Old fool!“ 

I honestly have no edge here on outcomes, maybe Trump IS going to ‘cut and run’ over a Chinese off-bridge as some think. If that happens then no way this gets spun as victory beyond avoiding the prospect of mutually assured destruction. If he does retreat, the China dominance vs US mean-reversion post the 1820-1950 period happens 10yrs earlier than it should! 
I have some sympathy with saying “It’s not over until Chris Wright lands in Tehran!”  
And as for the scurrilous rubbish being peddled, maybe this is 1st April or?! “Trump is being blackmailed by Israel with more revelations to come in the Epstein files. So that means US Marines could be deploying to cover up Trump's crimes? “
Well, Life is a Netflix series!!! 
To the average person THE LAST MONTH looks like: “The strait was open. Trump starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets f***. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. Trump is a narcissistic bovine destructive pr***. ( if only the US had an alternative!) 

So lets think PORTFOLIO & MARKETS:
Nutstuff ( out thursday) will go through thoughts on stocks! 
***You have to subscribe for that.   
Again YTD the Portfolio has protected Capital / and is +3% + in last 24 hrs so feels like we have the right “bar-bell” 

What I will say on stocks: 
1. Are there really still 27x “Muppet” Buy ratings on NIKE? ( another long time vocal “avoid” calls.  The call for me is Harley/HOG vs NIKE! 
2. RASBERRY PI in UK 🇬🇧 🚀. I said £1bn at £600m by yr end, prob sooner! 
3. Decent China Date= ⬆️ China Real Estate/ +  China Equities.
4. If any ceasefire follow-through, my +ve airlines work from a few days ago will prove prescient. WIZZ. 
5. UK & NORTH SEA: Focus names: 100% resolute here; 2 names of absolute HUGE focus ( more in Nutstuff) as to Bullsh***ing / lying politicians on the North Sea running out of Oil & Gas it is plain and simple WRONG at conservative recovery rates there are 2 oil fields alone that can yield 800m bbls! 
( data/ thoughts out tomorrow). 
6. MACRO OVERLAY: just added more exposure to the US’s “back yard”. A Chart for your walls tomorrow! 

Nutstuff…

OpenAI; has to be said IMHO.

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Honestly I would avoid it like the plague: OpenAI is a capital furnace priced as a crown jewel hundreds of billions of future depreciation chasing tens of billions of revenue, a narrowing edge as Google closes fast, and a governance structure still held together with philosophical duct tape; this is late-cycle private money pre-selling a trillion-dollar IPO to the public and at the same time everyone is stampeding into the least defensible layer of the stack, because LLMs are already becoming commodities. From where Nutstuff sits and in great conversations with GeorgeO, this means the real money will sit one layer up in applications built on proprietary data, distribution and a workflow lock-in;  honestly let Sam Altman burn the tens of billions training ever-better models, because models are simply the new electricity, abundant, ruinously expensive to build, and worthless on their own while the returns will accrue to whoever owns the factory that is plugged into it.

EASTER IS ABOUT PEACE & RENEWAL, lets hope for both…

A THOUGHT: "It might not be easy to tell the truth, but that's precisely why it's worth doing."
"History is littered with the names of those who spoke up against the official narratives of their time, who were laughed at at least, locked up, tortured, burned at the stake, you name it and then who, long after they were gone they were revealed to have been right all along."

SO TRUE & POIGNANT TODAY: “A real soldier does not fight because he has something that he hates in front of him. He fights because he has something that he loves behind his back.” 
GK Chesterton.

IT SEEMS COMRADE MILIBAND HAS FINALLY CAVED IN ON THE NORTH SEA. 
“ Finally reality bites when platitudes meet physics.”
It seems Ed Miliband IS going to approve first major North Sea gasfield project in decade. (Some caveats below, but if the UK has to ration Avation fuel and diesel a full pivot has to come IMHO)   (thanks WP.) 
Nutstuff has been on this North Sea Energy call for over two years now, it was avery lonely place back then, but we have stuck with a large and diversified portfolio of UK listed and North Sea assets so not just babbling platitudes, but backing the call with £££.
My deeply contrarian call back then was and has been consistent, and simply that economic reality would eventually collide head-on with political ideology in the North Sea, and that there would only ever be one winner! 

***In NUTSTUFF I go through the 6 key stocks we own (alongside a number of others in US drillers & Boats etc) all +>40%-90% YTD, and my clear rationale with valuations for ownership of each. If I had to just own 1 or 2, I make clear which these are too.

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