Ukraine bombs Russian refineries. Russia bans diesel exports. Diesel prices hit record highs. Inflation ticks up. Your grocery bill gets worse. Charts remain completely useless.
Technical analysts spent the week drawing lines on crude oil futures. Support at $78. Resistance at $84. Head and shoulders forming. None of it predicted a single refinery getting blown to pieces. None of it will predict the next one either. The chart showed a bullish pennant. The headline showed actual explosions. These are not the same thing.
Iran gets mentioned in the summary. Another war knocking out more refineries. More supply disruptions. More price spikes. Retail traders will pull up their RSI indicators and decide this is a buying opportunity. They will purchase USO calls based on a MACD crossover. The refineries will still be on fire. The calls will still expire worthless.
Moscow bans diesel exports because they need fuel for their own economy. Basic supply and demand. Econ 101 stuff. But some guy in Ohio has a Fibonacci retracement level that says diesel should be at $3.20. The guy in Ohio loses money. The Fibonacci sequence does not care. Mathematics cannot rebuild a refinery.
Diesel prices matter. Trucks run on diesel. Trucks move everything. Everything costs more when trucks cost more. This will show up in inflation data. It will not show up in your moving average convergence divergence. You cannot chart a missile strike. You cannot backtest a war.
The headline screams fundamentals. Wars. Explosions. Export bans. Physical supply destruction. And somewhere right now a technical trader is zooming into the 15-minute chart looking for an entry signal while the refinery burns in 4K on YouTube.
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