The price of anything is just a number, a snapshot of collective mood swings wrapped in market jargon. Traders will tell you that price distills a world of information into one clean figure. If that’s true, then gold’s relentless climb tells us something sobering: despite the stock market flirting with record highs, caution is creeping back into the room.

Pricing is supposed to be a rational affair — supply, demand, and a few other economic theories you vaguely remember from that class you slept through in college.

Why does a Toyota Corolla cost less than an Aston Martin? Same raw materials, different perception.

Gold, however, plays by its own rules.

One ounce today is the same as one ounce 2,000 years ago. No upgrades, no Bluetooth, no marketing gimmicks. Just the same shiny metal that has survived the economic follies of every civilization that thought it was too clever for its own good.

Right now, there are some fearful headlines for the oil industry. There’s rising talk of a recession. Reduced global trade from tariffs. And President Trump’s call to “drill, baby, drill,” encourages more production.

More supply, all else being equal, means lower prices. Good for consumers, but that’s usually not good for energy producers. Or is it?

Oil could be ground zero for the phenomenon of what we call “winners and losers.”

Networked warfare didn’t begin in Trump’s America; it emerged earlier, far from Washington, in the chaos of the Iraq War. During the early 2000s, traditional military analyses failed against an insurgency that defied conventional explanation. Over seventy distinct Iraqi insurgent groups—driven by diverse motives such as religious zeal, tribal loyalty, or economic despair—operated together with astonishing adaptability. Though fragmented, they became a networked insurgency unified around a single goal: expelling American forces.