The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday edition that war is spreading and the stock market is pushing record highs. The Globe's Tim Shufelt writes that the day after Iran lobbed a barrage of missiles at Israel, the S&P 500 index closed to within a hair of its previous record high. Canadian stocks ended the day a few points away from setting their own high-water mark. This may seem like an odd contradiction -- or an indictment of markets as indifferent to disaster and tragedy. Over a century of conflict, the stock market has demonstrated a near-immunity to geopolitics. From the Cuban Missile Crisis to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, any negative reaction in stocks is typically recouped within days. Only when the global economy is threatened do these episodes tend to have any lasting financial impact. U.S. advisory firm LPL Financial compiled a list of two dozen geopolitical flare-ups starting with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The average move in the S&P 500 on the first trading day was a loss of 1.1 per cent. The index then typically sold off for 19 days, having declined a modest 4.7 per cent. There are lots of reasons to worry about a wider Mideast war, but your money probably is not one of them.