Earnings Season Is Here — But Wall Street's Too Busy Watching Oil Ping-Pong Between $80 and $120
With WTI doing its best yo-yo impression and geopolitical chaos drowning out guidance calls, here's how sentiment is shaping up into earnings season.
Let's set the scene: it's earnings season, and instead of obsessing over EPS beats and forward guidance, retail traders on Reddit and YouTube are watching WTI crude spike to nearly $120/barrel overnight before crashing back below $89 — a $38 single-session swing that Bloomberg Daybreak called "nearly unprecedented." The Strait of Hormuz, which moves roughly one-fifth of global seaborne oil supply, has been shut for over a week. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are cutting output. Any company with supply chain exposure, energy costs, or international revenue is walking into earnings with a blindfold on.
Social sentiment right now is chaotic good. The Jeremiah Babe crowd is screaming market manipulation after the Dow shed 1,000 points premarket on March 9th, then somehow closed up 230 — all on Trump declaring the war "very complete" at a Miami press conference. Retail positioning heading into earnings is defensive but twitchy: energy names are getting bid on every Iran headline, while consumer and travel stocks are getting quietly punished in the background. Airlines, retailers, any name with meaningful fuel cost exposure — the options market is pricing in wider ranges than usual, and the Reddit sentiment boards agree.
The wild card nobody wants to say out loud: if Brent stays anywhere near $92 through the next two weeks of earnings calls, every CFO on the planet is going to spend their entire Q&A dodging energy cost questions — and "we're monitoring the situation" is not going to cut it for traders who watched oil do a $38 round trip before breakfast.