Forget Oil – This Is the Worst Impact of the Iran War VIEW IN BROWSER By Michael Salvatore, Editor, TradeSmith Daily In This Digest: - The Strait of Hormuz is not just about oil
- Predictive Alpha’s top forecasts point to energy, land, and biotech
- 76 years of history says March is the month to sell in midterm election years
The war in Iran is hitting closer to home than you think… By now, you probably know all about the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S.-Israel campaign against Iran, which began Feb. 28, has effectively closed off the narrow waterway that previously routed a fifth of the world’s daily oil supply. Oil prices have surged more than 40%. Gas is up more than 50 cents a gallon nationally. Everyone knows that and is constantly being reminded of it. But what everyone doesn’t know, and isn’t talking about enough, is the impact on the world’s food supply. The Persian Gulf isn’t just the world’s gas station. It’s also one of the world’s biggest producers of fertilizer chemicals that make it possible to feed 8 billion people. The countries disrupted by this conflict export nearly half of global urea and roughly 30% of global ammonia. Urea is the world’s dominant nitrogen fertilizer. It drives yields on the corn, wheat, and rice that fill grocery shelves around the world. Another 45% of global sulfur exports – the key ingredient for phosphate fertilizers – pass through the Strait as well. We are not talking theory here. QatarEnergy, one of the world’s largest urea producers, has ceased sulfur, ammonia, and urea production following drone attacks. Iran, another major regional producer, has taken its own ammonia capacity offline. And the timing makes it worse. About half of the nitrogen applied to U.S. corn happens in the spring. This supply shock is landing at the worst possible moment in the planting calendar. It’s a real problem. This isn’t just a matter of grocery prices rising – and they almost certainly will. It’s a matter of food supply constraint on a global scale. Our mission here at TradeSmith is to help you leverage data to find great trade opportunities. And what our data shows is a blaring green light on domestic fertilizer producers. In fact, our systems flashed buy signals weeks before the attacks began… Domestic fertilizer producers were already in healthy uptrends – the war just added fuel… TradeSmith’s Short-Term Health indicator measures a stock’s recent price action against its own historical volatility – how far and how fast it tends to move – to give you a daily read on whether momentum is building or breaking down. It works on a simple traffic-light system: Green means buy, Yellow means caution, Red means sell. And it was already flashing Green on this corner of the market weeks before the war began. Here’s what the TradeSmith Screener shows when you filter for Short-Term Health Green Zone stocks in the Agricultural Inputs industry across the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, Dow, S&P 400, and S&P 600: 
CF Industries (CF) is the standout. Its Short-Term Health buy signal flipped Green more than a month ago – well before the strikes on Iran. Since then, the stock has climbed more than 45%. CF operates the Donaldsonville complex in Louisiana, the largest nitrogen fertilizer facility in the Western Hemisphere. It runs on low-cost U.S. natural gas. When Gulf fertilizer chemicals go offline, CF is among the few producers positioned to fill the gap. Nutrien (NTR), the world’s largest potash producer, has held a Green signal for more than three months. Mosaic (MOS) flashed a new signal three weeks ago. And CVR Partners (UAN), a pure-play domestic nitrogen producer, has been Green for more than 10 months. All of these stocks are up big over the last month and week – save for Scotts Miracle Gro (SMG). That saw its signal flash on Jan. 8, and the stock ran as high as 15.7% before recently pulling back. What matters here is that none of these signals were triggered by the Iran news. The data was picking up real momentum in this sector well before the war began. That’s what Short-Term Health is built to do – surface the trend before the narrative becomes consensus. So keep an eye on these companies as the conflict continues. They’re a key beneficiary of the disruption. Just mind your risk management. If we see a true ceasefire, the momentum in these stocks could quickly evaporate. Predictive Alpha is watching solar, Texas land, and a drug company most investors have never heard of… Predictive Alpha is TradeSmith’s AI-powered stock price forecasting engine. Think of it as a large numbers model. In the same way large language models like ChatGPT predict the next word in a sequence, Predictive Alpha predicts the next price move. We trained it on more than 100 billion stock market data points – patterns hidden in the noise – and it projects where a stock is likely to land up to 21 trading days out. Here are the top five forecasts from the current leaderboard: 
Let’s focus on the top three, as each one tells an interesting story… - Enlight Renewable Energy (ENLT) – projected gain: +7.7% to $75.58 by April 10. Historical target accuracy: 94.5%.
Enlight develops and operates wind, solar, and battery storage projects across the U.S., Europe, and Israel.
In a market where nuclear and renewables are gaining tailwinds from both the AI data center buildout and the sudden unreliability of Gulf oil, Enlight sits at an interesting intersection. And at 96.9% historical directional accuracy, this is among the most reliable signals in our system. - Texas Pacific Land (TPL) – projected gain: +5.1% to $558 by April 6. Historical target accuracy: 93.8%.
Regular readers will remember TPL from our March 3 issue. At the time, Predictive Alpha had it ranked first by expected move. That forecast called for a 17.1% move to $613 by March 19.
With oil now above $100 a barrel, TPL has a powerful new tailwind on top of the AI data center angle we covered then – a $50 million investment in Bolt Data & Energy, co-founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, to develop large-scale facilities on its West Texas land.
TPL hasn’t quite run 17.1% since March 3 – it’s up about 1.4% as of this writing. But Predictive Alpha is still bullish. - Kymera Therapeutics (KYMR) – projected gain: +4.1% to $82.26 by April 2. Historical target accuracy: 92.2%.
Kymera is a clinical-stage biotech based in Watertown, Massachusetts. And it’s doing something that very few drug companies can do: targeting diseases that no other drug can touch.
To put it simply, most drugs work by blocking a “problem protein” that causes disease.
But some of the most dangerous disease-causing proteins don’t have a surface a drug can grab onto. Kymera’s approach hijacks the body’s own protein disposal machinery and redirects it to destroy those proteins entirely.
And to identify the right targets, it uses a proprietary platform built around predictive modeling – narrowing the field of candidates before a single experiment is run. This is exactly the kind of AI and machine learning applications in biotech we’ve been tracking here in the Daily. And it’s worth watching closely what Predictive Alpha is picking up here. 76 years of history says March is a sell window… TradeSmith’s Seasonality tool analyzes historical price patterns over full market cycles – as far back as the data allows – and can filter by presidential cycle year to isolate patterns that repeat across similar conditions. One of its most useful filters looks at midterm election years like the one we’re in now. Markets tend to follow a consistent rhythm in the second year of a presidential term. 
March has posted a positive return 68.4% of the time in midterm years – nearly seven out of 10 – with an average gain of 1.3%. That’s the strongest showing of any month in the first half of the year. In a normal market environment, that would be a straightforward bullish signal. But this isn’t a normal environment. The Nasdaq 100 is in a Short-Term Health Red Zone for the first time since just before the Liberation Day crash. Technology, Financials, and Consumer Cyclicals are all showing deteriorating signals. Oil is trading above $100 a barrel for the first time in years. In this context, and given what happens later in the first half of the year, March is looking like a good opportunity to sell. Just look what happens in June: 
Scroll forward to June in the same midterm-year dataset, and the picture reverses sharply. June has posted a losing return 73.7% of the time in midterm years. The average loss is 2.4%. This is exactly the kind of thing TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan was talking about when he talked recently about in his “Year of the Bear” warning in Friday’s issue. And the midterm year pattern is just one of several reasons why he’s cautious on the rest of this year. March’s seasonal tailwind gives you a brief window of relative calm. But when you look at the months ahead, we can see that it’s an opportunity not to buy, but to get your house in order. If you’re a Trade360 subscriber, check your Short-Term Health statuses. Tighten your trailing stops on positions that have run hard. Scan for Yellow Zones – those are your early warnings. And anything already in Red has given you your exit signal. And if you’re not a Trade360 member but want to learn why our CEO is calling for more volatility this year and how to protect yourself, click here to watch his full presentation. The investors who come out ahead in 2026 won’t be the ones who called every headline right. They’ll be the ones who had a reliable system when things got noisy. That’s what TradeSmith is built for. To building wealth beyond measure, 
Michael Salvatore
Editor, TradeSmith Daily | 
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