Old finance wisdom says that there are only a handful of prices you need to look at to know what's up in the world (oil, treasuries etc). Bitcoin has definitely joined that crowd, being the early warning sign for all manner of things, especially during weekends.
But oil was weird in the last few days and weeks of Middle East conflict. It, like, shot up rapidly in the beginning... and then massively declined as Iran shot rockets at U.S. air bases. (we talked about this a little during the Pizza-pentagon convos #1008955, also at SN live #1011257).
That's weird. That's new. Otherwise, this is what you'd expect:
As Iran started firing missiles at a US air base in Qatar on Monday, oil traders responded with striking speed — not by buying, but by selling.
Within seven minutes of the first launch at about 5.30pm London time, Brent crude, the international benchmark, began to slide. It took only 20 minutes for the losses to accelerate to 3 per cent. By 7.30pm, the price had fallen 7.2 per cent to $71.48, the sharpest daily drop in nearly three years.
Financially savvy traders had already deduced that it would reduce, not increase, U.S.-Iran tensions:
The speed of the sell-off in a market that typically surges at any sign of geopolitical strife caught many by surprise. Even as civilians took cover and television channels broadcast images of missiles in the night sky, traders had already correctly concluded that the attacks would reduce, rather than heighten, tensions between the US, Israel and Iran.
Apparently oil traders and others had been paying close attention to satellite imagery of U.S. forces in the region, and since troops and equipment had already been largely moved...
That intelligence helped traders to draw two conclusions: the missile launches were largely symbolic, and the Islamic Republic, having demonstrated a response to US strikes on its nuclear facilities, was unlikely to further escalate by targeting the region’s most vulnerable asset — its oil infrastructure.
I'm sure there's some Trumpian I Lowered the Oil Price claim somewhere,
A tentative ceasefire between Iran and Israel, brokered by President Donald Trump, triggered another sell-off on Tuesday, with Brent falling 6.1 per cent to just above $67 a barrel, below the level it was trading at before the war.
"There was a mad rush to the top and a mad rush down.”"
P.S., the archived headline is much funnier
archive: https://archive.md/aeffa