No Sure Things in March

March Madness arrived today, not with that overwrought “in like a lamb, out like a lion” civics-class poem, but with the blunt force of volatility as Brent crude touched $115 a barrel this morning. No easing in. No polite transition. That’s March. That, too, is war and, in its own way, the famed NCAA tournament. It’s immediate chaos, with brackets already unraveling in real time. Which, if you’re paying attention, is exactly how markets behave when geopolitical conflict becomes the macro. 

There’s such a temptation every year to believe the structure in the so-called brackets implies order. That seeding matters, that history offers guidance, that the best teams ultimately will assert themselves and win the pool. But March Madness exists to disprove that illusion. It is a system designed to produce disorder under the guise of competition.

Doesn’t that sound familiar? Because right now, investors are operating under a similar fragile framework. Global equities slipping, oil prices elevated, and a growing sense that what used to work as an investor, owning “quality” no longer guarantees anything. Peter Boockvar’s point about needing to be more discerning isn’t a suggestion, it’s a warning that the bracket has already broken.

The Russell 2000 drifting toward correction territory is your trendy upset pick gone wrong. Perhaps it’s over-owned, overhyped, and suddenly very exposed to the turmoil of uncertainty. Meanwhile, the K-shaped economy keeps stretching its arms: Spring break for some, while others are tethered to the pump.

And then there’s the mounting $39 trillion in US debt, the cost of keeping a complex economic system running on a global scale. Servicing it will require growth that feels increasingly theoretical. Which is where AI enters, not as a solution, but as a wager. If the optimists are right, AI is the ultimate top seed, capable of carrying the entire bracket. If the pessimists are right, it’s an empty champion: productivity without participation, abundance without income. A system that maybe wins on another planet in a universe far, far away but loses in practice on planet Earth.

Let’s discard the lamb-and-lion cliché. March doesn’t transition, it shocks. One minute it’s winter, the next something unseasonably like spring but not.

So, whether you’re filling out your bracket today (you’re late!) or allocating capital, the lesson is the same: the moment you assume stability is the moment the upset becomes inevitable.