What We Got Wrong: What We Got Wrong, Week of June 27, 2026

What We Got Wrong, Week of June 27, 2026 The oil market made us look cautious in exactly the wrong direction. Earlier in the week we ran a piece arguing that crude prices had moved ahead of the physical supply recovery, that the market was too quick to price out the Hormuz risk premium given how slowly Persian Gulf exports were actually coming back. That framing was defensible on the evidence available. What we underweighted was how aggressively OPEC+ would signal additional output expansion on top of the ceasefire dynamics. Brent closed Friday at $71.98, down 20% for the month and below its 200-day moving average for the first time in the cycle. Our "markets are getting ahead of physical data" read was correct on the mechanism and wrong on the magnitude, the market kept going, and we were implicitly leaning against the move. The J.P. Morgan piece is a related embarrassment. We covered the bank's Brent call sitting $14 above spot as a potentially contrarian view worth noting. Fine. But if you go back further, J.P. Morgan was calling $100-plus in early June. We covered those forecasts then too, presumably with appropriate gravity, because it was J.P. Morgan. Their own sharp downward revision, from $100-plus to the high-$80s, deserved more scrutiny than we gave it. Analyst forecast chasing is a content trap, and this week illustrates it. The heatwave coverage was reactive. We wrote about back-to-back UK supply warnings on Friday, about French oil-fired generation jumping sevenfold, about German power holding near €98. All accurate. None of it anticipated. The heat anomaly had been in the European extended forecasts for most of the week; the European grid stress story was there to write on Tuesday. We picked it up Thursday and Friday when it was already happening and already priced. One thing we got directionally right but probably framed too cleanly: the TTF forward curve crack. TTF Q+1 fell 16% week-on-week while spot European power rose on heatwave demand. We noted both. But we could have been more explicit about what that divergence tells you, the market sees the heatwave as a spot weather event, not a structural gas tightness signal. The forward curve disagrees with the spot electricity price, and that spread is where the real story sits. We noted the data; we didn't quite make the argument. Coverage was thinnest on the India MSME diesel story. The piece was solid, but it ran late Friday and got buried under the Hormuz and heatwave pieces. The second-order demand effects of the West Asia conflict, diesel availability for backup power in emerging market industry, not just Gulf crude export volumes, is the story that will matter most six months from now when the Hormuz recovery narrative is old news. We should be writing it more often, not less. The nuclear piece was honest about the economic obstacle, construction costs above market power prices is the right framing, but the headline led with "policy momentum." That's the order of emphasis the market doesn't share right now.