Investors are used to the concept of a portfolio. In a portfolio, you don’t own one thing, you own a bunch of different things. The hope is that when something in your portfolio is doing poorly, other things will do well, and that will smooth out the ride. That’s the theory, at least. Right now…not so much. Pretty much no matter what you own, you are just betting on oil. And assuming you own typical financial assets, you are betting on oil to go down, and it is not cooperating.

The charts below show the picture. The dotted line is when the war started. We’ve inverted the purple lines to make the relationships easier to see. We’ve also included the prior 6 months so that you can see how much the relationships have changed. Finally, we’ve slapped pre- and post-war correlation numbers in the corner of the charts for the mathy folks who read this, but they don’t say anything the chart isn’t already making clear.

Equities are just oil:

Bonds are just oil:

The US dollar is just oil:

Metals are just oil:

What are the implications of this? Use March as a gut-check. Virtually every strategy, fund, and asset class lost money at the same time. It should feel like “oof, that really sucked, but I can live with it.” If it feels worse (or better!) than that for you, it is probably a good indicator that you need to tune the risk level of your portfolio, and maybe to some degree the composition.