Treasury yields went up. Oil prices went up. Those two things happened on the same day. A financial journalist saw both events and decided they were related because typing "as" between two facts counts as analysis now.
July inflation data drops soon. Investors await it. They await it the same way a dog awaits dinner. Panting. Excited. No idea what happens next. The number will print. Someone will call it hot or cool. Yields will move. Traders will pretend they predicted it. By Thursday nobody will remember what the number was.
Iran tensions continue. They're ongoing. They've been ongoing since before most retail traders were born. But sure, this time the tensions are definitely what moved Treasury yields on a random Tuesday in August. Not the fifty other variables that actually matter. Not positioning. Not technicals. Not flows. No, it was definitely the Iran thing you read about in a push notification.
The correlation between oil jumping and yields edging higher sits somewhere between your horoscope and your uncle's stock tips. Both sound confident. Neither makes money. The headline links them because markets moved and journalists need to file before lunch.
Here's what actually happened: bonds sold off a few basis points in low-volume summer trading. Oil caught a bid. Two separate things occurred in a world where millions of things occur every second. A writer connected them with the word "as" and called it a story.
Retail checked their portfolios. Saw red. Googled "Iran tensions." Read half a Wikipedia entry. Sold their bond ETF. Bought an inverse oil ETN they don't understand. The ETN has a 2% daily decay rate and they'll notice in three months when it's down forty percent despite oil being flat.
Photo by Richard Bell on Unsplash
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