Introduction — Why I reopened the file

Soon after the first Russia–Ukraine headlines appeared, Oz and I ran a quick check on how markets had behaved around earlier conflicts. The data showed a familiar pattern: a violent price swing followed by a return to the line set by money supply, earnings, and valuations. Social-media threads, meanwhile, promoted the opposite view, that wars rewrite the cycle.

That gap between data and online opinion pushed me to revisit the record from before World War I to the present. My aim is simple and personal: I want to decide, for my own capital and for clients who rely on my work, whether a shooting war forces a change in long-term positioning or whether it merely shakes prices for a few weeks.

In my view, backed by more than a century of prices, conflicts trigger short-lived volatility but do not set the timing or length of bull or bear phases. The next sections show the evidence and explain why liquidity and policy remain the dominant drivers.