April Monthly Recap
· Monthly Recap · 5 min read
By Victor Chen
Top Global News Events
SpaceX Files for the Biggest IPO in History. Who Actually Wins?
On April 1, SpaceX filed a confidential S-1 targeting a $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion valuation and a raise of up to $75 billion, setting up the largest public offering ever ahead of a June listing. The headline is the rocket company. The opportunity sits one layer down, in the aerospace and ground-infrastructure suppliers that get repriced when the prospectus goes public and the comparable names have already moved.
The AI Trade Escapes Nvidia. Is Memory the Real Bottleneck?
April broadened the AI trade beyond a single name. Micron rose more than 50% on the month, AMD more than 70%, and Qualcomm nearly 40%, after Micron moved HBM4 into volume production at pricing 50% above the prior generation. The market spent the month re-pricing memory as the binding constraint behind AI demand, then sold it off hard in early May when inflation reappeared.
Powell Out, Warsh In. Is the Fed Still Independent?
Kevin Warsh's combative confirmation hearing was held April 21, with the committee advancing him on a 13–11 party-line vote ahead of Chair Powell's May 15 term end. The market question is not the next rate move but what a politically contested Fed does to the risk premium, a question that shows up first in long-end yields, not the FOMC statement.
FOMC
The FOMC met on April 28–29 and again held the federal funds target range at 3.50%–3.75%, a fourth consecutive hold. The committee remains pinned by the same conflict it faced in March. The oil shock keeps upward pressure on inflation while the threat to growth has not resolved, and that combination removes the case for cutting without yet making the case for hiking. The soft-landing path is now being steered through a variable the Fed does not control.
The bigger development in April was not the rate decision but the succession. Kevin Warsh's confirmation hearing on April 21 moved the leadership transition from theoretical to scheduled, with Chair Powell's term ending May 15. The market's question for the rest of the spring is less "what will the Fed do at the next meeting" and more "what does the Fed look like under new leadership during an inflation scare." A more hawkish chair inheriting an oil-driven inflation impulse is a different setup than a routine handover in a calm market, and prices began to reflect that in April.
Market Recap
Index Performance
S&P 500: +10.5%
Nasdaq: +14% to +16%
Dow Jones: +6% to +7%
The Best Month of the Cycle, Right After the Worst
April reversed March almost entirely. The S&P 500 rose 10.5%, the single best month of the entire five-plus-year advance, and it came immediately after a month that ended in correction territory. Nothing was resolved in between. The war did not end, oil stayed elevated, the Strait of Hormuz stayed closed, and the Iran talks stalled. Equities climbed anyway.
The lesson is uncomfortable but worth stating plainly. The best month followed the worst, with no all-clear signal separating them. An investor who sold the March correction to "wait for clarity" spent April waiting while the market delivered a 10% month without them. Corrections do not ring a bell at the bottom, and recoveries do not ask permission. This is the practical case against trying to round-trip volatility: the cost of being out for the rebound usually swamps the comfort of being out for the drop.
Where the Recovery Came From
The rebound was led by the same names that fell hardest in March. Mega-cap technology and semiconductors drove the move, joined by a memory-chip rally that broadened the AI trade well beyond Nvidia. Alphabet rose roughly 34% on the month on cloud and advertising strength, while AMD, Micron, and Qualcomm posted some of their strongest months on record. Strong first-quarter earnings did the heavy lifting underneath the price action.
This is the direct counterpoint to February's rotation lesson. Two months ago the takeaway was that mega-cap tech does not always lead. April's takeaway is the other half of the same truth: leadership is not permanent in either direction, and the sector you abandon during a correction is often the one that leads the recovery out of it. The portfolio that captured April is not the one that called the rotation perfectly. It is the one that stayed diversified enough to be holding the leaders when leadership changed back.
In conclusion, the theme of April is the recovery, and the cost of waiting for clarity. January's barometer pointed to a constructive year. February warned that a good portfolio is a diverse portfolio. March showed that even a diverse portfolio bleeds when a supply shock hits a point everyone depends on. April closes the sequence with the hardest discipline of the four: staying invested through a correction you cannot explain, into a recovery you did not see coming. Time in the market beat timing the shock, again.