The market is making new highs nearly every day in the past week. But it is likely making a major top now with a potential of a drastic correction in the weeks ahead. Here is one of the major risks as shown below.
The most dangerous place in any market is wherever the crowd has agreed to stand. When positioning gets one-sided, the unwinds are violent and unforgiving. Silver’s collapse last fall is the cleanest recent example. The setup looked unstoppable, until it didn’t.
The April Bank of America Global Fund Manager Survey, drawn from 193 managers running $563 billion, gives us the cleanest read on where consensus has piled in. “Long oil” and “long global semiconductors” now share the top spot as the most crowded trades, each cited by 24% of respondents. “Long gold,” which dominated this list for most of 2025, has slipped to 15%. “Long Magnificent 7,” once the consensus trade with 54% of managers crowded into it back in December, has collapsed to just 9%.
Look at the futures curve. Front-month Brent is around $108–110, but the December 2026 contract is pricing roughly $80, and the back end falls into the $60s by late 2027. That is the steepest backwardation in modern oil history. The futures market is making a clean bet: this shock is severe but short-lived. Equities are trading the futures view that by year-end, oil normalizes and the earnings drag is contained. The cash market is trading reality: barrels can’t get out of the Gulf today.
Pay attention to that slope. The market is not pricing oil at $90 in 2027; it is pricing it at roughly $70. That is either a generational good hedging opportunity for any business that buys energy, or a generational mistake that gets corrected violently.
