Crude oil has become one of the most headline-driven markets in the world right now. A single geopolitical update can move prices within hours. We saw this recently: June 1st: Crude surged 5% on escalating Middle East tensions June 11th: Crude fell nearly 4% in about an hour as de-escalation hopes emerged So how do you trade crude oil options in such an environment?

This is where many traders make a mistake. They see a large move and immediately think options must be expensive. But the better question is: Was the move larger or smaller than what the options market was already pricing? If crude moves 250 points but the straddle was already pricing 450 points, the move may not be as extraordinary as it looks on the chart. The options market often anticipates large moves before they actually happen.

Most people think trading is only about charts. Candlesticks. Indicators. Support and resistance. But those are just tools. Trading is something much bigger. At its core, trading is the business of taking calculated risks under uncertainty. One of the best examples doesn't come from a trader. It comes from one of the greatest investors of all time.

Buffett's assessment ultimately proved correct. The scandal damaged American Express. But it didn't destroy customer trust. The business recovered. The stock recovered. The investment became one of Buffett's best-known early wins and helped reinforce a lesson that would shape his investing philosophy for decades. When the market becomes obsessed with short-term fear, opportunities can emerge in businesses whose long-term economics remain intact.

"It's not timing the market, it's time in the market that makes money." Traders usually hate this idea. Because trading is supposed to be about timing. So what happens if a system is designed to stay in the market all the time? We backtested exactly that. Here's what happened 🧵

The trade statistics reinforced the same conclusion. The intraday systems generated a huge number of trades, with Parabolic SAR taking almost 3x more trades than the moving average system. That matters because every additional trade comes with a cost. The average PnL per trade was already small, so transaction costs and slippage can quickly overwhelm whatever edge exists. The positional systems told a very different story. Trade counts dropped significantly, and the win rates settled around 37% for the moving average system and 43% for Parabolic SAR. Those numbers might seem low. But that's exactly what trend-following systems typically look like. The objective isn't to win most trades. It's to make sure the winners are large enough to matter.