Spinning in my chair

Disclaimer: it’s easy to do nothing when you’re always wrong, and since I’ve been wrong for 95 consecutive days in a row now (yeah Hormuz has been closed that long!), it’s good I can write entertaining posts because it looks like that’s the only thing I’m qualified to do. By continuing to read, you agree this post is purely for entertainment, and acknowledge that I’m not qualified to give financial advice of any kind, or assist with financial planning, and agree that my goal is to provide neither. This is a blog of my thoughts, and it just so happens I’m currently thinking and writing about geopolitics and commodities; though I have a large backlog of AI and health & fitness articles I plan to write over the coming weeks.

The summary of this post is that I haven’t been looking at the markets. Most days I’ve had no idea what the price action is in the stocks I own, and that’s how I like it. I try to buy quality and then sit on my hands doing nothing, and right now, it’s just impossible to keep up with the news anyway. Thus, I’ve just been focusing on AI research, and it looks like I’ll be submitting two papers to an AI conference this month. I’ll likely write about how I expect the next stage of the AI buildout to affect commodities later this Summer. I’ll also write an article soon explaining (in hopefully easy to understand terms and pictures) what deep neural networks are learning and how they’re computing the answers to queries.

Why I’ve given up on trying to track the news? Each hour, at least one American official makes multiple statements about how a deal is imminent. About every three hours, at least one post from Iranian state media, or a politically affiliated Iranian posts somewhere (or is interviewed by some outlet) and says something close to “we aren’t even talking to America, they keep making demands they aren’t in the position to ask us for”.

The craziest thing is that the “free market” still trusts statements made by Trump, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Pete Hegseth, Barak Ravid, etc. Their statements all continue to move oil prices lower, despite all of them having been wrong for >95 days now (recall: Barak wrote Axios articles saying this war wouldn’t happen and published them… checks notes… 96 days ago. Meaning that doing the opposite and believing the opposite of what Barak says is quite literally the easiest way to make money in 2026.

If you remember my posts on Substack and on X about the Strait of Hormuz closure from the first day this war started (which started for me the moment Iran retaliated by hitting neighboring country oil infrastructure), it’s basically as simple as betting on the behaviour of the Iranians.

In my opinion, it doesn’t matter if America wants to make a deal. Iran has to want it as well, and I think the American x Israeli assassinations of senior Iranian leadership left behind extremists.

Alas, what do I know, oil is still below $95 despite both sides actively firing missiles at each other today, a 14.75mil barrels of crude drawdown in America, and Iran officially posting that the ceasefire has ended (and not with a peace deal, but with more violence).

Thus, I’ll spin in my chair for a few more weeks while I continue to watch the barrels in storage plunge at record levels. Surely, the USA can’t lose >2mil barrels/day forever. The ink required to print Axios articles requires oil! Alas, we don’t print things anymore, and that’s why semiconductors keep going higher.

Eventually, the market will care, right? If not, my current plan is to go down with the ship. Even though I’m officially a computer scientist by trade, and a current AI Ph.D., I continue to believe that physical reality matters, and that every day oil is above $80 is a great day for Canadian oil producers (which everyone knows make up my entire oil exposure).

For paying subs, I continue below.