Nine minutes to the dollar. Less than ten minutes passed between the two marks — this is the mode in which the quote doesn't move, it jumps, and the spread widens in the moment.
Why the market flinched. At 17:58 Moscow time, Donald Trump stated: "We can take all of Iran's oil" and "The Strait of Hormuz belongs entirely to us." The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow sea corridor between Iran and Oman, through which the main flow of oil from the Persian Gulf passes. Any hint of its blockade or of a military scenario is instantly priced in by the market, because there is simply no alternative route for such a volume.
What has already been said in Europe. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot warned: a new escalation between Iran and the US will lead only to losses and rising oil prices. That is, for now diplomacy is working not to remove the risk, but to confirm it.
What this means for the trader. Oil is currently trading not on supply and demand balance, but on headlines. Such levels hold until the next comment from a politician, and movement in either direction can come without a schedule — unlike macro statistics, geopolitics has no publication time.
Oil moved a dollar in nine minutes
If you were sitting at the terminal at 16:49, you saw the quote simply skipping over levels. The problem is that oil isn't available in every prop program, and where it is, there's a separate leverage for it, its own overnight limits and rules on price gaps at the open. A geopolitical gap can easily eat through the daily loss limit faster than you can place a stop. These points are looked at in the regulations in advance, not after the first blocked trade.