What We Got Wrong: What We Got Wrong, Week of September 8–11, 2026

What We Got Wrong, Week of September 8–11, 2026 The biggest disconnect this week was the EU gas storage piece versus the TTF price on the same day. We published a piece warning that European storage could close the winter at around 15% of capacity, genuinely alarming, the lowest seasonal inventory in records going back to 2011, and TTF fell 3.31% that afternoon. We didn't explain that gap. If you only read our storage piece, you'd expect prices to be climbing. They weren't. We should have spent a paragraph on why: what the market was already pricing in, what other factors were pulling the other direction. Writing about a supply warning without acknowledging the price action looks like we either didn't notice or didn't think it mattered. We noticed. We should have said something. The Russian refinery piece had a framing problem. The headline pointed to Russian refinery restarts as the thing capping RBOB gains. But Brent eased almost a full percent on the same session, and RBOB held flat. Crude weakness was doing most of the work. Framing the refinery restart story as the primary cap implied the crude move was secondary, and that got the causality backwards. The Ukraine-Russia refinery disruption story is real and worth covering, Russian crude processing running at a 21-year low is a genuine number, but we let the compelling narrative pull us away from the simpler explanation. On the LNG coverage: we gave the 80 Mtpa Hormuz disruption a lot of space this week, and rightly so. But JKM held flat at $24.81/MMBtu. We never really addressed why. The Bangladesh deal, 18 cargoes from TotalEnergies to replace lost Qatari supply, was good, specific reporting. But taken together, our LNG pieces this week leaned heavily on the disruption story without enough attention to what was keeping spot prices from reflecting it more dramatically. Contract structures, demand response, cargo re-routing, there's a story there we mostly skipped. The Fed and oil piece argued that Brent above $104 was "the central variable" in the September 16 rate decision. That's a legitimate frame, but we weighted it toward the restraint argument. The Bloomberg Surveillance quote about well-behaved labor costs was used to support the supply-shock narrative, which is one reading. Another reading is that the Fed hikes anyway because it can't be seen to accommodate $104 oil. We covered one side harder than it deserved. Coverage that was just thin: the Britain solar piece got cut off before it made a real argument. Italy's data centre grid queue story was solid on the supply-side problem but didn't touch what any of the 94 GW of requests would actually mean for Italian power prices if even a fraction connects. The ERCOT piece was the strongest of the week, the logic that shrinking generator outages shifts price risk toward demand is well-supported and underreported. Short version: we over-indexed on disruption narratives this week and under-explained why several markets weren't pricing them the way the fundamentals implied they should. That's the actual miss.