West Texas Intermediate crude has closed up or down by more than 3 percent on eleven of the past twenty four trading sessions. On May 20 it fell 8.82 percent. On June 1 it rose 5.49 percent. On June 16 it fell 6.79 percent. Each of these moves tracked a specific headline about the negotiations between Washington and Tehran, not a documented change in how much oil is actually flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.
This is not noise. It is a pattern, and the pattern has a name. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's research on the availability heuristic found that people judge how likely an event is by how easily examples come to mind, not by how often the event actually occurs. A headline that says a deal is close is vivid, immediate and easy to recall. A base rate showing how many previous close headlines did not hold is not.
Thirty Eight Times and Counting
Between March 23 and June 9, CNN counted at least 38 separate occasions on which President Trump said a deal with Iran was imminent. The pattern continued this month. A memorandum of understanding was signed June 17. Iran said Saturday it had closed the Strait of Hormuz again, citing Israeli strikes in Lebanon. By Monday morning, Vice President JD Vance was describing the latest round of talks in Switzerland as a good foundation for an agreement.
Each of these headlines moved the price of crude. None of them, on its own, changed the physical supply of oil reaching market. What moved was investor attention, and attention is precisely what the availability heuristic governs. The most recent vivid claim crowds out the less vivid, more useful fact: that this specific pattern of claim and reversal has repeated for nearly four months.
The Gold Miners Felt It First
The TSX's gold producers showed the mechanism plainly on June 19. Wheaton Precious Metals fell 4.8 percent, Agnico Eagle lost 2 percent and Barrick Gold dropped 1.6 percent as gold extended its retreat from the highs it touched earlier in the spring. The same investors who treated gold as a hedge against an unresolved conflict were, within days, treating a stronger US dollar and a more hawkish Federal Reserve as reason enough to sell. Both reactions can be individually rational. Held together, they describe a portfolio responding to whichever input arrived most recently rather than to a stable view of risk.
Crude's slide over the past month is best read through its daily moves rather than its daily closes: the size and direction of each swing has tracked headline timing far more tightly than it has tracked any new shipping or production data.
The eight largest single day moves this month each coincided with a specific headline about the US Iran talks rather than a documented change in supply. Source: Investing.com historical futures data.
What the Research Says About the Fix
The corrective is not to ignore headlines. It is to separate the vividness of a claim from its evidentiary weight, which is precisely what a base rate forces an investor to do. Terrance Odean's research on individual investor trading behaviour found that the accounts trading most frequently around news events were also the accounts with the worst net returns, a finding that has held across multiple market cycles since. The frequency of trading correlated with the frequency of headlines, not with any improvement in the information available.
None of this means the underlying conflict is resolved or that oil prices have found a floor. It means the size and direction of the next move is far less predictable from the headline alone than the headline itself suggests, and the investors most exposed to a costly decision right now are the ones treating today's good foundation as meaningfully different from the 38 that came before it.