You can plan a pretty picnic...

I graduated from grad school with an MBA in 2010. That means much of my time in the classroom fell immediately after the 2008 crash. It was a weird time, of course, but I remember so much of my economics instructor’s teachings.

“The market,” he’d tell us, “trades on two things: Fear and greed.”

This Fear and Greed concept isn’t something he made up; it’s actively tracked. If you visit CNN’s Business page, there is a Fear and Greed tracker right at the top.

Now, a lot of what we learned in that class and other economic principles in undergrad and graduate school doesn’t make much sense because, in 2026, nobody trades based on fundamentals. If they did, Tesla wouldn’t be worth what it is, and Elon Musk wouldn’t be the richest white supremacist and CEO on the planet.

While Ben Collins (not THAT Ben Collins) isn’t the first person to call the market astrology for men, his reiteration of that point is even more important today than ever.

Gasoline prices had been on a steady-ish decline for a few days now, with talk of a peace deal hitting the usual sources. But then today, we learn that might not actually be the case.

Here’s what you need to know about fuel prices. In a world where the market runs entirely on vibes, there is no real way to predict where oil prices will be next week. One timely-placed exclusive to Axios and the market suddenly shifts, until another timely-placed exclusive to Axios causes the reverse to happen. That’s before you factor in the social media posts from someone who needed a yearly physical three times in the past year.

Will gasoline hit $10 a gallon? That seems like a stretch, but I wouldn’t rule it out in some parts of the country, depending on whether a peace deal actually happens and how long the Strait of Hormuz actually stays closed. We do have much more production capacity than we did during the last oil crisis, and the United States has been willing to reduce sanctions on Russia (which should be career-ending for the President but is barely a blip in the news cycle) and pull other levers to keep prices from skyrocketing.

What is obvious is that this war started because Trump wanted to do it. Was he persuaded by Benjamin Netanyahu to do something no other U.S. president was willing to do on his behalf? Maybe. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we were totally unprepared for this war, and we’re being led by incompetent leadership with no real plan to end the conflict. And no matter what Trump and his team actually think, you can’t just post your way out of this one.

People are making money on this conflict. Market manipulation is happening. And while it’s hard to control investments like your mutual funds (Lord help us when they buy into the SpaceX IPO), it’s important not to get sucked into the hype.

One week, your gas might be cheaper than the next, but don’t expect stability until an actual peace deal is reached, the Strait is opened (whether or not there are tolls is a different story; at least those are predictable), and enough time has passed for things to stabilize. Only then will we really know what the price of oil — and of gasoline — will be.

In normal times, experts could reasonably predict the financial future, but in these Trying Times™️, anyone who is trying is just guessing.

Just a little update from the land of Chad: I recently launched (in public beta) a new app to help automotive journalists, business reporters, and industry people to better keep track of recently filed automotive patents. DRIVE patents is a free tool that you can use to set up email alerts for new filings, plus view the most “editorially significant” each week when new patents drop from the USPTO and the EPO.

If that’s something that’d help you or a friend, give it a try. I appreciate any feedback or feature suggestions.