World leaders welcomed a U.S.-Iran deal that took ninety days to negotiate while retail traders spent the entire time panic-buying oil futures because someone on Twitter said Hormuz was closing. The agreement ended bouts of fighting that started in late February. Europe signaled sanctions relief. Everyone urged the Strait of Hormuz to reopen. The traders who bought crude at the top are still holding.
Stop-start negotiations roiled global energy and commodities markets for three months. Roiled is the word journalists use when they mean prices went up and down like they always do. Chart patterns remained identical to every other geopolitical scare since 2003. Resistance held. Support held. The 200-day moving average did not care about Iran.
Europe's sanctions relief will take six months to implement. The Hormuz reopening will take another four weeks. Retail traders needed twelve minutes to lose money on both the way up and the way down. They bought energy stocks when CNN said war was imminent. They sold them when Bloomberg said peace was achieved. They somehow lost on both trades. The charts warned them. The volume warned them. Basic pattern recognition warned them. They bought anyway.
The most remarkable part is that every single technical indicator that mattered in January still matters now. The same levels. The same patterns. The same result. Diplomats spent ninety days arguing while the S&P 500 drew a perfect ascending triangle and broke out exactly where it was supposed to. Global commodities traced a textbook head-and-shoulders reversal. None of it required a headline. All of it required reading a f*cking chart.
Three months of negotiations. Thousands of news articles. Dozens of emergency summits. Zero impact on any pattern that actually pays. But sure, keep reading the news.
Photo by on Unsplash
Leave a Comment