Trump threatened to bomb Iranian bridges and power plants if Iran shoots at ships in the Hormuz Strait. He made this announcement after U.S. Central Command hit Iranian targets for an eleventh consecutive night. Somewhere a day trader is pulling up a shipping ETF and thinking this is his moment.
The Hormuz Strait handles about 21 million barrels of oil per day. That's roughly a third of all seaborne-traded oil. But Kevin from Reddit already knew that because he read it on a TikTok last Thursday while sitting in his Camry during lunch break. Kevin now holds fourteen different energy stock options that expire Friday. Kevin does not know what contango means. Kevin will not look it up.
Bridges and power plants make excellent bombing targets because they're stationary and vital to infrastructure. They also make terrible投资thesis because—and this may shock the guy who bought $DRIP after watching one YouTube video—geopolitical instability is not actually a stock picker's edge. It's just what happens when you confuse a Bloomberg push notification with actionable intelligence.
The threat came after eleven straight nights of strikes. Eleven. That's not a escalation anymore. That's a routine. That's a habit. That's something you put on your Google Calendar with a recurring reminder. Yet every single one of those nights some trader convinced himself he'd be the first to frontrun the chaos by buying Raytheon at market open.
The Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. Plenty of room for commercial traffic under normal circumstances. Zero room for it when two countries are threatening to blow up each other's infrastructure. But this will not stop someone from confidently explaining to you why tanker stocks are undervalued right now actually.
War is bullish until your broker liquidates your account because you over-leveraged on a headline you didn't finish reading.
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