Gold Holds as Oil Nears the Line Trump Can’t Talk Down

Last Tuesday, Iranian proxies in northern Iraq took shots at an LNG export terminal in the Mediterranean Sea just off the Egyptian coast. Gold went up $100 that day. Oil went up. Equity markets went into a bit of a tailspin.

That is a long way from the Persian Gulf, and that distance is the whole story. Iran and their proxies also fired on the major U.S. Middle Eastern staging base in Jordan. Saudi Arabia now wants to put a coalition together to fight the Houthis in Yemen. A conflict that started in one waterway is now being fought in three.

Meanwhile the Fed held the fed funds rate steady at their just concluded July meeting, and the equity markets, the Treasury markets and the currency markets were anything but steady. South Korea’s KOSPI dropped about 23% in three sessions. The Dow took a big hit. The 10-year Treasury yield spiked. The yen needed a rescue measured in tens of billions of dollars.

What was steady through all of it? Gold. It closed the week at $4,045, and it probed higher along the way.

I want to show you why that steadiness is not luck, and why I think the single most important thing to watch from here is not gold at all. It is a number on the oil chart, and what happens the first time it stops behaving.

The $100 Oil Trigger That Keeps Getting Pulled

I have watched and listened as President Trump has repeatedly come out to talk about how we are entering into negotiations, or a truce is at hand, or we are working on the memorandum of understanding. Jawboning the markets lower for oil in particular.

This past week I heard an interview with Jim Bianco, who is a brilliant analyst, and he said it quite succinctly: every time oil goes over $100 a barrel, President Trump does something to bring it back down. He tries to talk it down, or negotiations start, or a pause gets announced.

So I said, well, let’s put this to the test and see.

This chart tracks the daily price of Brent crude oil…the global benchmark for oil prices…from January through late July 2026. For investors, oil prices affect everything from energy stocks and inflation to the cost of running businesses and households. The chart overlays key geopolitical events, showing how a US-Israel attack on Iran, ceasefire deals, blockades, and military strikes each jolted prices sharply up or down. The most striking observation: oil swung violently between $71.57 and $114.44 in just seven months, driven entirely by war-related headlines rather than normal supply-and-demand forces. Currently sitting near $86.88, the price remains highly sensitive to any new military developments between the US, Israel, and Iran.

Here is my Brent crude chart going back to January 1, with all of the military activity labeled on it. Everything in red is aggression. Everything in green is a lack of aggression or a cease of aggression. Look at where the green labels sit relative to that $100.00 line.

Jim is right. It is as if President Trump has a trigger at $100 per barrel.

And this is a very disturbing sign, because you cannot prosecute a war properly to the final conclusion you desire if you are beholden to financial or commodity markets. We peaked at $100.69 per barrel after the U.S. completed their 13 day bombing campaign, we paused, and now we are punching back up again from about $84 a barrel to a little over $90 with the renewed fighting of the past three or four days.

That is the pattern, and it has worked every single time so far.

Which brings me to the part I actually care about. A trigger like that only works while there is still slack in the system to talk about. There is a point where jawboning stops moving the price, and I believe we are very close to it.

If you have not done so already, join us behind the paywall. Let me show you exactly where that point is, what the refined product market is already telling us about it, and the support levels in gold and silver I am watching to confirm what happens next.