The United States bombed Iranian rocket launchers near the Strait of Hormuz. Retail traders immediately opened their charting software to see if this meant their Tesla calls would print.
The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow waterway through which roughly 21 million barrels of oil pass each day. Blowing up military equipment next to it qualifies as a geopolitical event. Some guy in Ohio with a Robinhood account saw the headline and bought USO at the top because his Discord told him to.
This follows strikes in late July, which means the United States has now established a regular bombing schedule in the Persian Gulf. You cannot put that on a candlestick chart. You cannot draw a trendline through missile strikes. There is no Fibonacci retracement level for international military conflict.
But that will not stop anyone. Right now someone is typing "Iran strikes bullish or bearish" into Twitter search. Someone else is pulling up the correlation between crude futures and the Nasdaq. A third person is convinced this confirms their Elliott Wave count.
The Iranian rocket launchers do not care about your portfolio. The sailors on the USS destroyer that launched the strikes are not checking the pre-market. The Joint Chiefs of Staff did not consult the 200-day moving average before approving the operation.
None of this information helps you trade. It never did. The headline screams urgency and the market yawns or spikes for eleven minutes before forgetting the entire thing happened. By Monday someone will be asking if they should buy the dip on a semiconductor stock because their cousin heard something at Applebee's.
The Strait of Hormuz could close tomorrow and some retail trader would still be holding BBBY shares waiting for the squeeze.
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