Does Fake News Matter?

I have long held the view that us mere mortals know little of what goes on behind the scenes in the world. We could spend time surmising or reading the words of the few good learned people amongst the world influencers; But I don’t have enough time to delve into this and I must follow a distilled approach.

When it comes to trading or investing, I have also long held the view that fake news or otherwise or whether we have a theoretical "perfect" insight into the truth matters little. Not for one moment am I suggesting one should be complacent to the madness in the world around us. I can easily separate the business end from the private end and care about each as separate exercises.

So, in my trading I don’t really contemplate what is happening in the socio-economic world, I spend my time focussing on the charts.

The above is a preamble to the incongruence between the media (I desperately need to sell advertising space and control opinion) headlines about ructions in the Middle East and what is seen in the charts. And I refer more particularly about the price of crude oil. This is always a soft hot button – well so would the media have you believe. But things have changed, and many analysts have not caught up with the reasons for the waning connection between war and oil. But media trot out the same old story about climbing oil prices.

Let’s look at the charts for light crude:

Enjoy the ride

Tom Scollon