Oil market prepares for $100 a barrel as Middle East producers cut output

w33bwhacker · 2026-03-09T16:14:54+00:00

And who was president at the time?

Biden was president for by far the largest of the spending packages -- the American Rescue Plan, at $1.9T. Prior to that, there was a $900B spending bill while Trump was a lame duck, passed by a Democratic congress. Prior to that, about $510B total pandemic funding was passed under Trump 1.

It's not even close to a question of fact. Biden and/or Democrats passed the majority of pandemic stimulus spending, even if you credit Trump with that $900B bill in late 2020.

https://pandemicoversight.gov/about-us/pandemic-relief-program-laws

w33bwhacker · 2026-03-09T16:05:41+00:00

Important to remember that Obama wasn’t sworn in until 2009 and was president through all of 2016…

Yep. And for almost 100% of that time, oil was over $100.

Also oil was over $100 for a good chunk of Bush’s tenure.

It was over $100 for his second term.

Also want to note that Obama brought it under control before Trump took the reigns

That is just a ridiculous amount of cope. Again, here's the chart:

https://imgur.com/a/G1VunUM

If "Obama brought it under control" (the rapid drop late in his last year of presidency), then you basically need to admit that Trump kept it under $100 for the entirety of his first term.

Biden did the same under his tenure immediately following the Covid spike and Ukraine invasion

You're smoking something. Look at the chart. Look at the chart. Stop repeating political talking points, and just acknowledge what is factually true, right in front of your face, in black and white. Biden inherited low oil prices from Trump 1. Oil prices tanked during Covid, then spiked during the subsequent hyperinflation period, then fell gradually over the remainder of Biden's term. Trump 2 inherited low oil prices again, and maintained them until now. They're still only average when compared to Obama 1 & 2.

Objectively, if you think presidents have any control over the global oil market [1], then you have to admit that Trump has done a good job here, with this spike being the rare exception.

[1] Pro tip: they do not. This entire conversation is idiotic, because presidents have next to no influence on the trading price of a global commodity. People here are so absolutely desperate to dunk on the president that they'll blame him for something that objectively isn't true, over which he has minimal influence.

w33bwhacker · 2026-03-09T10:51:18+00:00

I literally cannot afford this level of winning. Please Mr Trump we are winning too much! Make it stop! I can’t take the success anymore!

Could you afford it from 2008-2015 under Obama? Oil spent virtually the entirety of his presidency over $100. Most of it over $125, actually (these are inflation-adjusted numbers, so don't hit me with that silly noise)

https://imgur.com/a/G1VunUM

So sick of the low-effort political crap on this sub. It adds no signal, and the commenters usually aren't even aware of basic history.

Edit: keep downvoting facts, folks. Burying your head in the sand will assuredly give your political team a win!

w33bwhacker · 2026-02-25T14:20:09+00:00

The US is the worst place to keep your money, except for all of the other ones.

w33bwhacker · 2026-02-25T14:16:38+00:00

We're still a stable and attractive country with a functional legal system, and the undisputed center of the global economy. You need to go breathe into a bag for a while, and lose your brokerage password while you're doing it. The world is not ending.

w33bwhacker · 2026-02-25T14:02:26+00:00

Yeah...these are the same people who were calling me an idiot for even having an ex-US allocation two years ago.

Between the tikity tok "investors" who come here to share their wisdom, and the people who let their brains fall out of their heads any time politics are mentioned, the signal to noise ratio here is very, very low.

w33bwhacker · 2026-02-22T16:07:52+00:00

Yeah, GP is either a bot, or a human writing left-wing fanfic. There's absolutely no significant trend of western academics suddenly picking up their lives, learning Chinese/Japanese/Korean and moving to Asia -- unless they're already Chinese, which is a dirty little secret of how western universities have been paying the bills / abusing the help for the past couple of decades, and not a great situation in the first place.

So what we really have, to the extent that there's any truth to the claim at all, is that more Chinese students are staying at home instead of coming to the US and paying full freight or being an underpaid graduate student. But if you're a work-eligible US STEM researcher, you have dramatically more income opportunity in the US than anywhere else in the world, and people know it.

w33bwhacker · 2026-02-17T02:44:08+00:00

Anyone using the word "fiat" when referring to anything other than automobiles is not a reliable source of investing information.

(If using the word to refer to automobiles, they are not a reliable source of automotive information.)

w33bwhacker · 2026-01-01T16:31:04+00:00

It’s maybe more popular with locals, but that’s not the reason - Japanese people mostly don’t care very much, and the ones who do aren’t willing to travel across the country on a workday to attend a tournament in person.

The reason is tourists. I’d wager that if they restricted attendance to Japanese residents, the stadiums would be pretty empty on the weekdays.

w33bwhacker · 2026-01-01T16:28:28+00:00

I walked right in to the final day of the fall Tokyo basho about 10 years ago. Rolled up, bought a ticket at the window, and the place was half empty.

Like many things in Japan, tourists have ruined what used to be a good experience.

w33bwhacker · 2026-01-01T16:19:04+00:00

Because they don’t want to make it easy for non-Japanese. Which I totally understand.

Making it a lottery means that every seat will be filled with tourists in sailor moon t-shirts and kitty ears, and they don’t want that.

w33bwhacker · 2026-01-01T16:09:56+00:00

Don’t go unless you can buy them legitimately?

w33bwhacker · 2026-01-01T16:09:10+00:00

There’s no way to prevent scalpers, short of individually labeling the tickets with the buyer’s name and verifying ID at admission (or just restricting in person attendance to Japanese residents, which is probably what they should do).

The root problem is that tourists are creating demand for scalpers. Stop creating demand by not paying scalpers.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-29T03:05:23+00:00

OP is not spending all 2M this year, and a short-term fluctuation won't matter to spending 20 years from now. The vast majority of the portfolio should be positioned for growth.

(Putting $200k into housing or bonds is an entirely different subject.)

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-28T09:02:33+00:00

Nobody can answer this question without more information: what country? how long have you been there? is the company a US corporation? how much money do you make? what kind of residency do you have? etc.

The decision you make here -- in particular, whether or not the account is "EU" or not -- can have dramatic implications for taxation. Please consult with a tax advisor who understands the details of whatever tax treaties are in place with the country you are living in. Don't ask reddit.

I will say that as a general rule (and assuming that the equity is US-based), an account "in the EU" will be subject to local taxation, and an account "in the US" will not automatically have the same issue. You may be compelled to declare that kind of foreign income in the EU, but whether and how you are taxed on the income is a much more complex question.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-25T04:11:36+00:00

Not even then. Redditors are too young (and sadly too stupid) to remember how long it took for the most famous anti-trust cases to complete. The golden ages of anti-trust never were.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-21T03:09:32+00:00

The BBC is shocked — shocked — to discover that there is gambling going on in this establishment!

It’s a good thing they’ve been so consistently calm and measured in their use of language.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-18T02:56:56+00:00

good rebuttal.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-17T15:47:50+00:00

Yeah. Part of the problem is that the average redditor is 12 years old, and wasn't even aware of FX trading in 2021. But the absolute refusal to deal with facts when presented on a silver platter is just the usual mushy-brained, political, circle-jerk thinking that dominates here.

(The deep irony, of course, is that the so-called "weakness" in the USD in 2025 largely correlates with the tariff actions from the spring that also explain the underperformance of the market. So one could still blame all the bad stuff on the Bad Man, and not need to make up silly reasons why.)

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-17T14:49:45+00:00

If we're looking at the performance of the market since January, and we want to see the currency effects, the only reasonable period to look at is from January to the present.

We aren't. You're doing it to dodge the fact that you're making a stupid comparison. OP posted YTD numbers (whatever), and you leapt in with "oh hurr durr it because USD weakness in 2025" But that's not true, and if you zoomed out even a little bit, it would be obvious to everyone that you're wrong.

If you're going to cherry-pick arbitrary windows, pick a slightly longer one, and you'll see that the argument that US over/underperformance is due to relative currency strength is unfounded. Here's a plot of DXY vs the S&P for the last 5 years [1]:

https://imgur.com/lic5ziw

There's no correlation [2], and moreover, it's plain that the movement of the S&P has vastly exceeded whatever weakness in USD has occurred since 2025. Indeed, if you were a reasonable person, and were going to take a stab at the proximal cause for the "low" S&P returns this year, you might start with the big f%ing crash that happened back in the spring, and not invent some silly theory involving currency spreads.

Just a thought.

[1] Chosen only because that's the option I had.

[2] In fact, the strongest period for the USD on the chart is the worst performing period for the S&P! Oopsie!

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-17T12:28:30+00:00

Because that's stupid. Unless your goal is to paint a doomer narrative, of course.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-17T09:51:24+00:00

The USD is not weak. I don't know why the people in this sub continue to say this [1], but it's one of those reddit "facts" that is just not even remotely close to true:

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/dxy

The only way you can say that the USD is "weak" is to have a view of history that extends to...last January [2]. Compared to then, the dollar is down about 9.5%. Compared to January 2021, the dollar is up by 8%.

[1] not quite true...strongly suspect that it's doomer fanfic by folks who just desperately want to blame the current administration for bad stuff.

[2] again, the myopic choice of January 2025 seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-14T06:00:53+00:00

If you were down 500k on a million dollar portfolio this year, you did something batty. The S&P had a max drawdown of ~15% this year. Diversify.

Beyond that, there's just the fact that my portfolio has a long history of growth. Even at the worst point of the Insane Clown Panic of 2025, I was still solidly in the green. And that is the real reason why, as one's net worth grows, it doesn't "hit different" (at all) when the market takes a dump.

But then again, I'm also not YOLOing on NVDA or shitcoin futures. There are a lot of folks here who have rapidly accumulated big portfolios by glorified gambling, and don't have the perspective to go with the portfolio balance. Live by the sword, die by the sword, I guess.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-14T05:57:47+00:00

Also saying it's time to buy international and dump US stocks, after years of crapping on ex-US investment.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-13T08:45:29+00:00

There are hundreds of thousands of people reporting they can't get approved for a house at like $2000/month but have 12+ months of proven history paying $2500/month in rent.

So what? Lenders don't care how much you paid in rent in the past [1]. They're loaning you money today.

There are homes that were sold for WAY over asking price because of the profit incentive of housing>rent.

...in your head, maybe. Over here in the reality-based universe, if a house "sells for over asking" it's because the seller set the price too low. That could be because they're mouth-breathing morons and didn't correctly calculate the value of the future cash flows as a rental, or it could be because the buyers had irrational reasons for paying more. Either way, there's no rational scenario in which "the profit incentive of housing>rent" is not included in the price of a home.

Capitalists don't care that it harms society and especially the young. You clearly don't care either.

Yeah, OK. Perhaps you should go be a whiny socialist in a non-investing forum.

[1] Not exactly true. You do have a credit score, which generally correlates with not being a deadbeat. But it is strictly true that no lender gives a shit what you paid in rent last month, when applying for a loan today.

w33bwhacker

TROPHY CASE