THE NONEXPERT a view, not a verdict.

WTI Crude

The Oil Market Isn’t Correcting. It’s Confessing.

Start with what the price is actually saying. WTI Crude sat at $119.5 on March 9th. By March 23rd it had cratered to $88.1. It bounced — tepidly, almost apologetically — to $93.2 by March 26th. That’s not a correction. That’s a market that believed one story for months, got caught holding the bag, and is now quietly revising its memoirs. A 22% drawdown in under three weeks doesn’t happen because of one variable. It happens because several wrong assumptions were true at the same time, and then simultaneously weren’t. The dollar is the easiest villain to point at. The DXY at 99.7 — knocking on the door of the … Read more

WTI at $86.9: The War Premium Is Leaking Out, But Don’t Call This a Retreat

The number that matters right now is $98.7. That’s where WTI crude was on March 11, 2026 — a vertical sprint from $71.2 just two weeks earlier, driven almost entirely by fear of what the U.S. might do to Iran. By March 25, that same barrel was trading at $86.9. So yes, the rally cooled. But a 22% monthly gain that partially retraces isn’t a collapse. It’s a market that ran on adrenaline and is now deciding how much of that move it actually believes in. The primary signal here is the war premium unwinding in real time. President Trump delayed a potential strike against Iranian targets inside a five-day … Read more

The Market Is Pricing Geopolitics. It’s Not Pricing the Crack Spread Problem.

WTI crude settled at $90.3 per barrel on March 24, 2026 — up 55% in roughly five weeks from a January low of $58.3. That move is extraordinary. But here’s the thing: the market is underpricing the wrong part of this crisis. Everyone is watching crude. The real trade is in what crude becomes once it hits a refinery, and right now, a critical piece of that conversion capacity just blew up. The primary signal driving this analysis is US crack spreads — the margin between raw crude oil and finished refined products like gasoline and diesel. Valero Energy Corp.’s major refinery explosion and subsequent shutdown has introduced a second-order … Read more