By Jeff Powell, CEO
Elevage Partners | March 31, 2026
You felt it before you opened a single account statement. The number on the gas pump. The grocery bill that runs higher than it should. The utility company’s notice sitting on the counter.
Four weeks into the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, the largest oil supply disruption in modern history is not an abstraction. Brent crude is up more than 50% from the start of the year. That number is not living in your brokerage account. It is living in your wallet, your heating bill, and every product that had to be shipped.
This is what makes the current environment behaviorally unusual, and, in our experience, unusually dangerous for investors who are typically disciplined.
Why Felt Pain and Portfolio Decisions Are a Bad Combination
That impulse is understandable. It is also usually wrong.
There is a consistent pattern in how investors respond to geopolitical shocks that bleed into daily life. They check their accounts more frequently. They notice that energy and defense positions have been the only things working and wonder whether they should have more. They see gold down roughly 16% from its March peak, an asset they expected to protect them, and wonder what to make of it. And quietly, they begin to feel that watching a portfolio decline is itself a reason to change it.
The problem with this logic is that markets have already responded. By the time the dinner table conversation turns to oil prices, that same conversation is happening in portfolios around the world simultaneously. Energy and defense positions have already moved sharply since the conflict began on Feb. 28. The investors now considering those trades are doing so after the move.
What a Well-Positioned Portfolio Should Be Doing
Our firm’s portfolios were not adjusted in response to Feb. 28. They were built before it.
The defense and energy companies we hold in our government-centric industries theme were positioned because our analysis identified them as structurally durable, not because we predicted this specific conflict. We recognized that revenues from these industries are shaped by forces that do not depend on any single news cycle, and that positioning has provided meaningful insulation during this drawdown.
The same discipline applies to fixed income. With the 10-year Treasury yield climbing as inflation expectations have risen, long-duration bonds have lost ground precisely when many investors expected them to provide safety. Our emphasis on shorter-duration, income-generating positions has held up better.
Gold has been the disorienting piece, and it deserves a direct answer. The energy shock that drove oil prices higher also pushed Treasury yields up and strengthened the dollar, both of which make a non-income-generating asset less competitive in the short run. We view the recent decline as a dislocation within a longer-term trend, not a reversal of the thesis. The case for gold, rooted in central bank diversification and long-run fiscal uncertainty, remains intact in our assessment.
What to Do With All of This
We believe three things can be true at the same time, and none of them cancels the others out. The current decline is real and uncomfortable. While geopolitical shocks like this have often proven temporary, that outcome depends on whether the underlying pressures become structurally embedded. And the risk of something more persistent cannot be dismissed: a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a stagflationary backdrop, or broader regional escalation.
The dinner table conversation tends to collapse all three into one: things feel bad, do something. A financial plan built around your goals, rather than a single market scenario, is designed to hold that tension without forcing a reaction to any one outcome.
The critical variable remains how long the Strait of Hormuz stays closed. Until that resolves, every asset class will carry its weight. A portfolio built with this kind of uncertainty in mind was never designed for one specific outcome. It was designed for a range of them.
As a fee-only advisory firm, we have no products to sell you. What we offer instead is a framework for thinking clearly through environments like this — and a standing invitation to talk.
If you’d like to discuss how your plan is positioned for what’s happening now and what may come next, we would welcome that conversation. You can start the discussion here.