How oil traders called the Middle East conflict

Tankers are seen at the Khor Fakkan Container Terminal, the only natural deep-sea port in the region and one of the major container ports in the Sharjah Emirate, along the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which one-fifth of global oil output passes on June 23, 2025. Photo by GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP via Getty Images

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As Iran started firing missiles at a U.S. air base in Qatar on Monday, oil traders responded with striking speed — not by buying, but by selling.

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Within seven minutes of the first launch at about 5.30pm London time, Brent crude, the international benchmark, began to slide. It took only 20 minutes for the losses to accelerate to 3 per cent. By 7.30pm, the price had fallen 7.2 per cent to US$71.48, the sharpest daily drop in nearly three years.

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The speed of the sell-off in a market that typically surges at any sign of geopolitical strife caught many by surprise. Even as civilians took cover and television channels broadcast images of missiles in the night sky, traders had already correctly concluded that the attacks would reduce, rather than heighten, tensions between the U.S., Israel and Iran.

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“It is all orchestrated, we know the base is empty. I knew from June 18 that the base was empty,” said Jorge Montepeque, an oil analyst at Onyx Capital Group, in a text message just after the attack began on Monday. “We have watched this movie before.”

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Since the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Iran, traders said they had been glued to social media and open source intelligence to interpret developments. “Everyone is in a similar boat, we are all tracking Twitter feeds, Osint accounts and everything you can to make sense of it,” said one executive at a major oil trading firm.

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Oil traders, for example, homed in on satellite images of Al Udeid air base in Qatar, which hosts 10,000 U.S. troops. They appeared to show that the U.S. removed planes from Al Udeid days before its air raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities this past weekend, and Tehran’s response to the attack on Monday.

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That intelligence helped traders to draw two conclusions: the missile launches were largely symbolic, and the Islamic republic, having demonstrated a response to U.S. strikes on its nuclear facilities, was unlikely to further escalate by targeting the region’s most vulnerable asset — its oil infrastructure.

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Oil and gas have continued to flow unimpeded from the region throughout the fighting, with Iran increasing its exports, according to energy consultancy Rystad, because it was unable to refine as much crude domestically.

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That reflected another feature of the oil market: traders are often good at keeping barrels flowing during the kind of turmoil that sends other industries into flight.

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The market’s reaction on Monday echoed its behaviour a week earlier, when crude prices initially rose as much as 5.5 per cent following Israeli air strikes on Iranian gas plants and fuel depots, before the gains evaporated when signs emerged that Tehran was seeking peace talks.

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Both episodes illustrate how, since the fighting began, traders have narrowed their focus to one overriding question: is Iran more or less likely to threaten oil tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz, the 33km wide chokepoint that connects Gulf producers with global markets?