Iran's state TV broadcast three of the late Ayatollah Khamenei's sons at his funeral. Mostafa, Meysam, and Masoud showed up to pray. The new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei did not appear on camera.
Retail traders immediately began charting the absence. Someone posted a Fibonacci retracement of the seating arrangement. Another guy calculated the relative strength index of familial obligation. A third drew a head-and-shoulders pattern on the procession route and declared it bearish for Middle Eastern ETFs.
The technical case looked strong. Three brothers present, one absent. That's a 75% attendance rate. Below the 200-day moving average of brothers who show up to things. Clear breakdown of support at the "doing the bare minimum" level.
One trader on Reddit announced he was shorting grief itself. He'd built a model based on coffin proximity and eye contact duration. The backtest showed 83% accuracy over the last four state funerals. He was risking his entire account on a bet that awkward family dynamics would trigger a liquidity crisis in crude oil futures.
The problem with this analysis is that funerals are not leading indicators. They're lagging indicators of death. Which happened already. The guy's already dead. The brothers either show up or they don't. The charts don't care. The moving averages don't update based on who stood where.
But the retail crowd kept trading. They always do. They see patterns in everything. Cloud formations. Funeral formations. The shape of a cleric's beard. All of it goes into the model. All of it confirms the bias they already had before they opened TradingView.
Mojtaba probably had Supreme Leader stuff to do anyway, but seventeen different trading discords are now selling a course on casket-side volume analysis.
Photo by Moslem Daneshzadeh on Unsplash
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