Vibe Trading Crude Oil With The Iranians
Why "unusual options flow" won't catch state-sponsored front running
Unless you’re scraping millions of data points, I’m pretty sure social media doesn’t really give you much of an edge…
(Although I do remember the Twitter hedge fund from ‘08 who thought differently.)
That is, unless you’re the Iranian parliament speaker… who appears to be “vibe-trading” oil and treasuries…
Confused? Yep, me too…
VIBE TRADING
Now, if you’re like me, the first thing you think is… “how do I front-run the front runner?”
And actually, long story short, I don’t think we can.
I thought about it.
If the Iranians really are trading crude before making announcements, then maybe we could spot the footprints and trade alongside.
Detect an unusual buy on front-month crude… the probability of Iran making some announcement just ticked up.
And what are the US going to do? Tell them they’ve been naughty boys and send the SEC round? 
But in reality, there’s no edge here.
If they were really trading crude, they’d need US accounts, all sorts of intricate structure to access US futures, and a way of syphoning that money back.
Not impossible, of course.
But that does mean if they’ve gone to all that trouble… they’re almost certainly hiding their trades well too.
If this is state-sponsored front running, they aren’t just loading the boat on crude call options for a big hit.
That’s detectable and just wouldn’t work. All these tools that track unusual options flow are no good here.
Of course, he could be talking nonsense, just to stir the pot.
That tweet got nearly 4.5m views, and Iran is hot on the social propaganda game… have you seen the AI Lego videos?! Warfare in 2026 is wild.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting. No edge here, unless you see something I’m missing?
Back to good ol’ fashioned price action 