Global markets closed their best week since the Iran war began on Friday, with the S&P 500 erasing roughly two-thirds of its March drawdown and Brent crude shedding another $4 a barrel as mediators in Islamabad inched closer to a written framework for halting six weeks of fighting — setting up an unusually high-stakes Asia open on Sunday evening and a week ahead packed with tech earnings, an OPEC+ technical review and a fresh round of U.S. economic data.

The June Brent contract settled Friday at $104.10 a barrel on ICE, down $3.20 on the day and $5.30 lower than the prior Friday’s close. West Texas Intermediate finished at $99.85, slipping below the psychologically important $100 mark for the first time since March 9. The two benchmarks have now retraced more than two-thirds of the spike that drove Brent to a $125.30 panic peak on March 27, even as Israeli aircraft struck targets near Isfahan overnight Thursday and Houthi forces in Yemen launched two anti-ship missiles toward vessels in the southern Red Sea, both intercepted.

“You can see the air coming out of the risk premium in real time,” said Maren Loftus, head of oil research at Helvetia Commodities in Geneva. “Two weeks ago this market was pricing a non-trivial probability of a closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Today it is pricing a messy but real path to a ceasefire. The strip is two different markets from one Friday to the next.”

The S&P 500 finished the week up 3.4 percent, its first back-to-back weekly gain since February. The index now sits roughly 1.1 percent below its pre-war close, a recovery from a drawdown that briefly exceeded 6 percent in late March. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 2.6 percent and the Nasdaq Composite climbed 4.1 percent, led by semiconductor and airline names. The Stoxx Europe 600 rose 2.9 percent and Japan’s Nikkei 225 gained 2.4 percent.

Much of the equity strength came from a stronger-than-expected start to first-quarter earnings season. JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup, which reported on Wednesday and Thursday, all beat consensus on revenue, though investment-banking pipelines contracted sharply in the back half of the quarter. JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon told analysts on the call that the bank had “leaned into volatility, not away from it,” and that fixed-income trading revenue had hit a quarterly record. Citigroup added 6.8 percent on the week and JPMorgan added 4.4 percent.

“The banks gave equity markets permission to look through the war,” said Priya Nair, head of equity strategy at Macquarie in Singapore. “If the financials had stumbled on credit or on capital markets fees, the bid for cyclicals would have evaporated. Instead the read-across has been the opposite — clients are trading, balance sheets are clean, and reserves were not built materially.”

The macro tape cooperated. The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield closed at 3.96 percent, three basis points higher on the week after a March consumer price report Thursday showed headline inflation rising 0.4 percent on the month, almost entirely on energy; core CPI rose 0.2 percent. Fed funds futures continued to price roughly even odds of a quarter-point cut at the Federal Reserve’s June meeting. The dollar index slipped 0.4 percent and gold eased $32 to $2,366 an ounce.

The week ahead is unusually dense. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley report Tuesday and Wednesday, and Netflix is due after the close Wednesday. The first of the mega-cap technology names begins reporting in the back half of April — a cycle made more politically fraught by the Senate’s narrow passage on April 7 of the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez moratorium on new hyperscale AI training runs, now before House Ways and Means.

“The Senate vote put a discount on the AI capex story that is still working its way through models,” said John Reilly, a senior analyst at Citi in New York. “Investors will be looking for two things on every hyperscaler call this month: confirmation that announced 2026 capital spending plans are intact, and a read on whether the House math is moving against the bill. If either signal goes the wrong way, you will see another six or seven percent come out of the AI-adjacent complex very quickly.”

OPEC+ ministers are scheduled to hold a technical review call on April 22 to assess implementation of the 1.5 million-barrel-a-day production hike announced at the April 1 Vienna meeting. Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said in a written statement Thursday that the group remained “ready to act decisively, in both directions.” Goldman Sachs trimmed its second-quarter Brent forecast Friday to $99 from $104.

Shipping and insurance markets continued their slow normalization. The Baltic Dirty Tanker Index fell 5.2 percent on the week, its fourth consecutive weekly decline, and war-risk premiums for transits of the Strait of Hormuz eased to roughly 0.75 percent of hull value, down from a 2.25 percent peak in late March but still about eight times pre-war levels. European natural gas extended its retreat as well: the Dutch TTF front-month contract settled at 38.40 euros per megawatt-hour, down 6.8 percent on the week and within striking distance of the pre-war range. The Cboe Volatility Index closed at 19.8, the first sub-20 reading since the war began.

Traders said positioning into Sunday’s Asian open was unusually delicate. The Islamabad mediators are scheduled to reconvene Saturday morning, and at least three diplomats involved in the talks told reporters Friday that a joint statement could land before markets open in Tokyo and Sydney on Monday morning local time. Brent options pricing implied a $5.40 move in either direction by next Friday’s settlement, the widest implied range since the OPEC+ Vienna meeting.

“Nobody wants to be flat into a weekend headline that prints either way,” Loftus said. “If we wake up Sunday night to a joint statement out of Islamabad, Brent opens with a three handle in front of it and you have a violent rotation in equities. If we wake up to a strike on a tanker, none of this week’s gains survive Monday morning.” She said her own positioning had been “trimmed to neutral on purpose.”

Asian markets reopen for Sunday evening trading at 6 p.m. Eastern. The week’s first major economic release in the United States is March retail sales on Wednesday morning, followed by the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book and the first reading of April consumer sentiment on Friday. Treasury will auction $13 billion in 20-year bonds on Wednesday afternoon.