I got completely chopped up in crude oil ($CL) yesterday. I was stalking what looked like a textbook setup on the 1-hour chart, clean as a whistle, and then the Trump headline about the Strait of Hormuz hit the wires. Everything went haywire. Price is all you need, I always say, but sometimes the news just comes in like a wrecking ball to test that theory. This time, it got me.

Heading into Wednesday afternoon, $CL was coiling beautifully. For about 12 hours, price was consolidating in a tight range between support at $88.50 and resistance at $89.20. The volume was drying up on the consolidation, which is exactly what I want to see before a big move. My plan was simple: wait for a high-volume break and close above $89.20, then enter long on the retest of that level as new support.

It's a bread-and-butter setup for me. I don't need fancy indicators or a moving average crossover strategy to tell me what's happening. The chart was screaming that it was building energy for a pop. My target was the psychological $92.00 level, offering a sweet 3.5R trade.

Then the news dropped. Boom. Price ripped straight through $89.20 without even breathing. No retest, no pullback, just a vertical green candle. And this is where I messed up. My discipline went out the window. FOMO kicked in hard. I saw the move happening without me and I chased it.

I market-bought a long at $89.65, convincing myself this was the start of a geopolitical moonshot. My stop was placed at $89.10, just below the breakout level. The candle wicked all the way to $90.10 and for a minute, I felt like a genius. Then, just as quickly, it reversed. The whole thing was a liquidity grab, a classic fakeout. The sellers came in with force and I was stopped out less than 30 minutes later for a full -1R loss. A totally avoidable, self-inflicted wound. It's the kind of trap that Alex Volkov is always warning about — news creating volatility, not sustainable trend.

My edge is pure price action and volume. I completely ignored the second half of that equation. A proper volume price analysis trading approach would have shown the spike had no substance. The volume on that initial rip was all ignition, but there was zero follow-through from buyers. The real volume came in on the reversal, which was the market telling me the move was fake. I just wasn't listening.

• My Mistake #1: Chasing a headline-driven spike instead of waiting for structure.
• My Mistake #2: Abandoning my pre-defined plan to buy a retest.
• My Mistake #3: Letting the news story override what the chart was actually saying.

Losing trades are the best tuition money can buy, if you actually learn from them. This one hurt the ego, but it reinforced a few key rules I'm pinning to my monitor right now. First, I will now wait for a full 15-minute candle to close after a major headline breaks. No more trading the initial emotional wick. Period.

Second, if a key level breaks on news, the retest becomes 10x more important. I need to see the market defend those support and resistance levels today to prove the move is legitimate, not just an algo-driven stop hunt. I also should have cross-referenced other markets. Gold ($GC) and the Dollar ($DXY) barely reacted, which was a huge red flag that this was an isolated oil-specific spasm, not a systemic risk-off event. It's like what Marcus Cole says about crypto; you need to see confirmation across the ecosystem, not just in one hyped coin.

For now, I'm completely hands-off oil. That range between $88.00 and $90.50 is a pure chop zone until we get a clean daily close outside of it. Lesson learned. The market always provides another setup. The key is having the capital—and the mental clarity—to take it. How many of you got caught in that oil trap yesterday, and what's your number one rule for not letting headlines dictate your trades?