Oil Hits $120, Then $87 in 24 Hours — The Market Is Having a Full Breakdown
Operation Epic Fury met its match: the bond market's anxiety and Reddit's short sellers
Buckle up, because Monday, March 9th was the kind of trading day that makes you question your life choices. WTI crude spiked to $120/barrel overnight as Iran nearly blockaded the Strait of Hormuz — one ship transited in 24 hours, which is basically a geopolitical fire drill — before cratering back to ~$87 after Trump's press conference on 'Operation Epic Fury' claimed 90%+ of Iranian missile launchers destroyed and 51 naval vessels sunk. The Dow, meanwhile, went from down 1,000 pre-market to up 230 at close. Jeremiah Babe on YouTube called it flat-out market manipulation. He's not entirely wrong to ask the question.
The real winners in the chaos? Airlines. UAL jumped 2.7% and LUV popped 3.5%, snapping a brutal six-day losing streak the moment oil dipped below $100. Reddit's r/investing was ahead of the curve — a post titled 'Thesis: It's going to end badly for oil speculators' hit 649 upvotes before the reversal even fully played out. Over in r/options, someone asked 'Who's shorting oil here?' with the casual confidence of a person who definitely did not short oil at $87.
The wildest subplot? MAGA is fractured. Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are all publicly torching Trump over Iran — Bloomberg Businessweek called it 'MAGA Is Split' — while Republican strategists are quietly stress-eating over midterm math. Trump, who once called $100 oil 'a small price to pay,' is now dangling an off-ramp faster than you can say 'approval ratings.' Nothing moves foreign policy like a bad polling crosstab.