Oil Hits $120, Then $87 in 24 Hours — The Market Is Having a Full Breakdown

Buckle up, because Monday, March 9th was the kind of trading day that makes you question your life choices. WTI crude spiked to $120/barrel overnight as Iran nearly blockaded the Strait of Hormuz — one ship transited in 24 hours, which is basically a geopolitical fire drill — before cratering back to ~$87 after Trump's press conference on 'Operation Epic Fury' claimed 90%+ of Iranian missile launchers destroyed and 51 naval vessels sunk. The Dow, meanwhile, went from down 1,000 pre-market to up 230 at close. Jeremiah Babe on YouTube called it flat-out market manipulation. He's not entirely wrong to ask the question.

The real winners in the chaos? Airlines. UAL jumped 2.7% and LUV popped 3.5%, snapping a brutal six-day losing streak the moment oil dipped below $100. Reddit's r/investing was ahead of the curve — a post titled 'Thesis: It's going to end badly for oil speculators' hit 649 upvotes before the reversal even fully played out. Over in r/options, someone asked 'Who's shorting oil here?' with the casual confidence of a person who definitely did not short oil at $87.

The wildest subplot? MAGA is fractured. Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are all publicly torching Trump over Iran — Bloomberg Businessweek called it 'MAGA Is Split' — while Republican strategists are quietly stress-eating over midterm math. Trump, who once called $100 oil 'a small price to pay,' is now dangling an off-ramp faster than you can say 'approval ratings.' Nothing moves foreign policy like a bad polling crosstab.