If you opened a textbook on military conflicts and the stock market, the rules seem pretty straightforward: when a major geopolitical conflict breaks out, defense stocks go up. It's the classic "defense supercycle." But if you’ve been watching the markets since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran on February 28, 2026, you might be scratching your head. The global markets have been subjected to intense geopolitical whiplash, but counterintuitively, the world’s b