Oil hit $102 per barrel. Highest close since May. Financial journalists acted like this was news instead of a number going up and then going back to where it was before. A roundtrip. You know what else makes roundtrips? Pigeons. We don't write headlines about them.
The premise here is that China—an entire country of 1.4 billion people—will determine what happens next to oil prices. Not supply. Not demand curves you learned about in community college before you dropped out to day-trade. China. The whole thing. As if Xi Jinping wakes up every morning and personally decides whether to buy oil or just let your calls expire worthless.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately started Googling "China oil consumption forecast 2024" like that's a thing you can know. They opened TradingView. Drew some lines. Convinced themselves they could predict what the second-largest economy on earth would do next based on a YouTube video and three Red Bulls.
The chart went up. The chart went back down. The chart went back up to where it started. This is called volatility if you want to sound smart at Thanksgiving or random f*cking noise if you want to be honest. Oil was $102 in May. Oil is $102 now. In between it did other things that also didn't matter. You could have just waited. But waiting doesn't feel like trading, so you didn't.
China could buy more oil. China could buy less oil. China could keep buying exactly the same amount of oil and the price could still do whatever it wants because markets are not machines that follow rules—they're chaos engines designed to transfer money from people who think headlines mean something to people who know they don't.
The technical analysis says oil is exactly where it was four months ago, which means every trade you made in between was just you paying commissions to learn nothing.
Photo by Zalfa Imani on Unsplash
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