What We Got Wrong — What We Got Wrong This Week

What We Got Wrong This Week The mistake this week wasn't a wrong fact. It was proportion. We published nine stories built on the same scarcity narrative — Hormuz shut, LNG gone, India and Pakistan scrambling — and one, really, that pointed the other way. That ratio says more about our bias than about the market. Start with the TTF figure. Our Wood Mackenzie piece, run Friday, cited front-month TTF jumping 35% to more than €60/MWh. That move happened on Tuesday, May 19 — almost three weeks before we printed it. We never told readers where TTF sits now. A three-week-old spike presented without a current level reads as today's number, which is exactly the trap a historical figure sets when it stands in for the live one. The fix is mechanical: any recycled price gets stamped with its date and the current level beside it, or it gets cut. The proportion problem runs deeper. Wood Mac's 80 Mtpa hole, Brussels' crisis package, India's LPG pivot, Pakistan chasing three cargoes — all real, all tight. But we ran the Commonwealth LNG story in the same batch: 8.5 mtpa booked out, feeding a 93-to-150 Mtpa US supply wave from late 2026. That cuts directly against the scarcity frame, and we treated it as an afterthought instead of the counterweight it is. When every story leans one way, the one that doesn't deserves equal billing. Then Australia. Victoria's free-power window and household bills falling up to 10% was the week's clearest bearish signal — a grid moving opposite to Asia's panic. We gave it one story. The uranium ETF dropping 11% as the AI-nuclear trade hit a valuation wall got one too, and we never tied the two together: both were the market saying "not so fast" to narratives we'd spent the week amplifying. Coverage went thin exactly where the data disagreed with us. Sourcing. The Poland transit story leaned on "traders speaking on Friday" calling a 58% fee cut a major shift — anonymous, and the cut doesn't take effect until next year. We framed a 2027 forward event as this week's news, on the word of unnamed sources. The rule from here: name the trader or the quote doesn't run, and a fee schedule that bites in 2027 gets labelled as what it is, not a headline. The China CIPS piece had the opposite flaw. We flagged that the Atlantic Council's own pages were erroring and that we were citing a citation, then ran the 920bn-yuan-a-day number anyway because it was too good to drop. Honest about the weakness, and we published it regardless. None of this was dishonest. It was a desk that found a story it liked — supply is tight, the strait is shut, everyone's scrambling — and kept finding it. The same week, the market was also building US export capacity, cutting Australian bills, and selling uranium. We caught those, barely. The discipline for next week is concrete: every reused price carries its date and current level; for every two scarcity stories, one that tests whether the squeeze still holds; and no market-moving claim rests on a trader we can't name. Less echo, more checking whether the panic we keep reporting is still true.