The Middle East is rattling energy markets again. Brent crude climbed past $85 a barrel in mid-July 2026 after fighting flared around the Strait of Hormuz, which carries roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil supply. The spike follows months of extreme volatility prices had surged to nearly $120 a barrel earlier in the year when the U.S.-Israel conflict with Iran shut down the strait for over 100 days, then retreated sharply after a ceasefire deal was signed. So any fresh tension along this critical waterway now sends oil traders back into panic mode almost by reflex.<\/p>\n
Equity markets, though, are telling a different story. Even as oil spiked, the S&P 500 and Asian bourses showed surprising composure, guided by a Wall Street theory known as the TACO trade. TACO stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out” a phrase coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong to describe the pattern where Trump announces aggressive policies, markets dip, and he quietly walks them back before real economic pain sets in. Investors have seen this cycle play out so many times from tariff rollbacks to ceasefire pauses \u2014 that buying the dip has become almost automatic.<\/p>\n
But the TACO trade is showing cracks. Analysts at BCA Research and Interactive Brokers warn that the strategy works best when Trump controls the off-switch, as he did with tariffs. A military conflict in the Middle East is harder to reverse unilaterally, and retail investors the main engine of TACO-driven buying \u2014 are already less active than they were in early 2026. Goldman Sachs and Rystad Energy both expect a well-supplied oil market over the medium term as Gulf production recovers and OPEC+ increases output. So while oil may spike on headlines, markets are quietly betting that neither Trump nor the strait will break the world economy \u2014 at least not yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Middle East is rattling energy markets again. Brent crude climbed past $85 a barrel in mid-July 2026 after fighting flared around the Strait of Hormuz, which carries roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil supply. The spike follows months of extreme volatility prices had surged to nearly $120 a barrel earlier in the year… Read More »Why Are Oil Prices Climbing Again Even as Stock Markets Hold Steady?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maxiomwealth.com\/askguru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maxiomwealth.com\/askguru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maxiomwealth.com\/askguru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maxiomwealth.com\/askguru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maxiomwealth.com\/askguru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4862"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/maxiomwealth.com\/askguru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4864,"href":"https:\/\/maxiomwealth.com\/askguru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4862\/revisions\/4864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maxiomwealth.com\/askguru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maxiomwealth.com\/askguru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maxiomwealth.com\/askguru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}