President Trump’s address to Middle Eastern leaders was, in McGuire’s words, “absolutely a sales pitch” — a laser-focused pitch for US crude and energy exports, delivered with a tight deadline. Talking to ET Now, McGuire said the message came with a roughly three-week window before the administration signals it will act against Iran, and McGuire says markets have absorbed that timeline with predictable anxiety.
ETMarkets.comCrude surged sharply in the wake of the speech. Asian equity markets fell broadly. The combination of a hard geopolitical deadline and an open-ended threat against Iran’s power infrastructure and water desalination plants has injected a level of uncertainty that traders are now scrambling to price in.
“Things can spike incredibly quickly — this is very much a work in progress at the moment”
Two scenarios, different outcome
On oil, McGuire lays out two scenarios with very different price implications. If tensions extend beyond the end of April and volatility deepens, he sees $130 to $140 per barrel as achievable — a level not seen since the height of the Russia-Ukraine supply shock. The velocity of any move, he cautions, will depend heavily on market sentiment and how quickly supply disruptions materialise.
The more benign case — where the standoff narrows and comes under control within the next week or two — keeps crude in an $85 to $100 range. That outcome would still represent elevated prices by recent standards, but it would avoid the kind of demand destruction and inflationary spillover that a triple-digit spike would trigger across import-dependent economies in Asia.
Surprising market move in precious metals
The more surprising market move has been in precious metals. Gold, which had pushed toward $5,400, pulled back sharply. Silver ran up to around $121 before what McGuire describes as a violent washout. At the time of the interview, gold was hovering near $4,720 and silver futures were sitting around $73.
The retreat puzzles many observers — geopolitical stress typically sends safe-haven flows into gold and silver. McGuire points to several competing forces that drained momentum from precious metals at a critical moment. US 10-year bond yields climbed from around 3.95% to approximately 4.36%, pulling capital toward fixed income. Traders who were heavily long crude, energy, and gas futures shifted their attention and capital toward those surging positions. Equity market weakness added pressure through margin calls, forcing some investors to liquidate metals positions to cover losses elsewhere. A strong US dollar also weighed on the complex.
“The precious metal market took a little bit of a break — it had a holiday,” McGuire said. The pause, however, may be short-lived. He sees gold and silver potentially finding their footing and staging a recovery through April and into May, once the initial frenzy around energy and equities settles and safe-haven demand reasserts itself.
Discipline works, not conviction calls
For investors navigating this environment, the message from McGuire is one of disciplined scenario planning rather than conviction calls. The Iran situation remains fluid, the Trump administration‘s timeline is firm but its execution unpredictable, and commodity markets are responding in real time to every development. In a market this reactive, range-trading the two oil scenarios while watching for a precious metals bounce may be the most defensible posture heading into the weeks ahead.