Soon, the headline traveled. Brent crude began dropping steeply, down roughly 4% to about $4.50 a barrel, roundtripping hundreds of millions of dollars notionally across the front-month contract. Doornbos received hundreds of replies to her post, calling her a liar, a market-manipulator and a pawn of the Trump regime.
By 11 a.m., she issued another post—”she had a responsibility to clarify”—that her original post contained no news, at all. She was just reiterating what was known; that discussions were centered on the nuclear deal, which Vice President JD Vance had already said, and that theoretically Iranians could accept.
“This took off unnecessarily,” Doornbos wrote.
Wall Street calls it the TACO trade—“Trump always chickens out,” coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong after Trump abruptly paused his “liberation day” tariffs in April 2025. But what started as a joke has become some hard serious liquidity. Morgan Stanley’s Mike Wilson told clients in a Sunday note that the Iran selloff was a correction inside an ongoing bull market, with earnings accelerating into the oil shock rather than rolling over. The median S&P 500 company is now growing earnings per share at a double-digit pace—the fastest since 2021. “The market trades in advance of the headlines,” Wilson wrote. “Investors should do the same.”
