"Conflict drives oil up": we tested the cliché on 40 years of data. It is false.

Two beliefs structure nearly everything written about the geopolitics of markets: conflict drives oil up, and fear drives rates down — the famous flight to quality. They are the two most universal priors in geopolitical finance. They are also the two founding theses of a product like ours, which exists precisely to observe the link between geopolitical events and markets.

In late August 2026 we tested both of them — properly, over forty years. Neither holds. And rather than filing that result away in a drawer, we are publishing it, because a product that only shows the measurements that flatter it measures nothing.