Rory Johnston

This was thought to be a temporary shock at the time.

And it's inherently temporary because we all thought it wasn't going to be sustainable.

The challenge is that when we think about fair value in the market, we think about the relationship between inventories and prices.

Part of what we've historically seen is that when inventories get really low and prices get really high, the outlook for future balances is also pretty precarious.

But what we see in this crisis is that going in, we were oversupplied.

The future was looking even more oversupplied.

So when you saw inventories drawing down towards tank bottoms, yes, if we hit tank bottoms and we actually hit that acute reckoning where you had to destroy demand because there was literally nothing left, then yeah, you could have gotten this massive spike.

But in terms of the market's

weariness or concern about those lower levels, you could make an argument that, well, it doesn't really matter if they go low because we know they're going to get swollen again next year as soon as this is open.

And I think that that's one thing that I may have misappreciated at the time, even if I went into this crisis bearish before flipping bullish during, you know, after Hormuz was closed.

I still thought that Hormuz was such a larger kind of shock to the system that even going in with a 3 million barrel a day surplus, a 13 million barrel a day loss of production was still going to put you in an extraordinarily tight position.

But again, I think that that's part of what I may have misconsidered.

I think the one final thing I'll say, and the one thing I haven't mentioned so far, and I think we should,

is the jawbone, is the fact that when I talk to traders, the one thing I heard time and time and time again is that, and these are like, these are prop kind of oil and products traders.

They have their own models that show them fair value.

They keep saying like all their models say this is a raging buy, but they got so blown out repeatedly in that kind of March and April period, all their risk management kind of limits have been throttled down by 90%.

that there was this general... The quote was, everyone's bullish, but no one's buying.

And I think one thing I also deeply misappreciated going into this crisis was the potential power of Trump himself, more broadly the Trump administration, to inject so much downside volatility that it kind of arrested the normal melt-up process.

And I think that...

If we had just had jawboning, I don't think it would have been enough.