Nifty's Fourth Straight Losing Week as the US and Iran Trade Fire Again — Even With a 7.8% GDP Print in Hand

Nifty closed the week at 23,897.70, down 1.15% — its fourth consecutive weekly decline, the longest such run in five months. The spark was a war that had gone quiet reigniting: after roughly a month's lull, the US and Iran exchanged direct strikes again, sending Brent crude surging nearly 8% to close in on $96 and rattling autos and IT. It happened in the very week India's statisticians dropped a number nobody was ready for — Q1 GDP growth of 7.8%, blasting past the RBI's own 7.0% forecast — and the market barely blinked. Layer on an Adani Enterprises stock that fell almost 10% for reasons that had nothing to do with Adani, a Fed governor who spent Thursday quietly undoing what his own chair said a week earlier, and foreign investors doing something they hadn't done in weeks — buying, mid-selloff — and you get a week that had far more going on beneath the surface than its headline number let on.

A Month of Quiet Ends, and Oil Rockets Back Toward $96

The two sides hadn't traded direct fire since late July — this week, that changed twice over

Last week's story was oil giving back its spike as the Iran standoff cooled into a slower sanctions fight. This week tore that script up. On Sunday, US forces struck two Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island near the Strait of Hormuz, after observing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps units preparing to fire rockets carrying sea mines into the waterway — the first US strike on Iran in over a month. Iran responded Monday by firing missiles at Jordan (eight were intercepted) and drones at a US-linked air base in the UAE. The US followed with a second, larger round of strikes Tuesday, targeting IRGC air defense, radar and mine-laying facilities; President Trump warned on social media that Iran would be "hit much harder" if it retaliated again. Iran defied the warning anyway, launching missiles and drones at Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait, with Iranian officials reporting dozens of casualties from the US strikes, including at a wedding celebration. Brent, which had settled near $88 the previous Friday, surged over 4% on Tuesday alone and kept climbing through the week, touching an intraday high above $97 and settling close to $96 by Friday — a weekly gain of roughly 8%, among its sharpest moves of the year, undoing in essentially two trading days the entire pullback that had defined last week's calmer story.

The damage in Indian equities was concentrated exactly where you'd expect. Auto and IT stocks — both sensitive to crude and to global risk appetite — led Wednesday's slide, with Eicher Motors down over 3% and only 14 of the Nifty 50's constituents managing to close green that day. On the other side of the ledger, PSU energy names had their moment: Coal India, NTPC and Adani Ports all rose as much as 4% on Wednesday, a reminder that in a market this jumpy, the same headline can be someone's loss and someone else's trade.

Zooming out, the US had a choppier but ultimately calmer week. Wall Street sold off Monday as the same Iran strikes rattled global risk appetite — the Dow shed over 400 points and the Nasdaq fell about 1% — then clawed most of it back through midweek and Thursday's Waller-driven relief, before a Friday jobs-report surprise (more on that below) pulled indices back down into the close. Net for the week: the S&P 500 eked out a 0.1% gain, the Nasdaq Composite added about 0.4%, and the Dow slipped roughly 0.3%. India, by contrast, spent the week absorbing an oil shock that Wall Street mostly shrugged off.