60TB.techI made $39,800 in 30 days trading the Iran war.
Not from insider knowledge. Not from a Bloomberg terminal. Not from a hedge fund's research desk. From a laptop in Memphis, between job applications and DJ sets, using the same publicly available information that every retail trader, institutional analyst, and cable news pundit had access to.
The difference is that I read the system instead of the headlines.
I used the profits to build a complete dawless electronic music performance rig from scratch. Waldorf Iridium. Erica Synths PERKONS HD-01. Erica Synths Hexdrums. Intellijel Cascadia. Squarp Hapax. Denon DJ Prime 4+. Bastl Kastle 2 Wave Bard. Premium cabling and stands for the whole setup. About $12,000 in hard assets that hold resale value and serve a creative project I've been building for years.
The remaining $27,800 stayed liquid. I was laid off in January. I'm not reckless.
This isn't a brag post. I don't run a trading newsletter and I'm not selling a course. This is a case study in systems thinking applied across domains, which is what this site is about. The thesis that generated those returns came from the same analytical framework I use when I'm architecting automation platforms, evaluating infrastructure dependencies, or sequencing a live hardware set. Pattern recognition doesn't care what domain it's operating in.
The Thesis
By mid-February 2026, the setup was visible to anyone paying attention.
The U.S. and Israel had been telegraphing military action against Iran for months. The diplomatic track through Oman was producing nothing. Trump's rhetoric was escalating on a schedule that matched his first term's pattern: provoke, escalate, announce, then claim credit for the de-escalation he caused. The market had priced in some geopolitical risk, but not enough. WTI crude was sitting in the low $60s. The S&P 500 was near all-time highs above 6,800. The VIX was low.
The Strait of Hormuz is a 21-mile-wide chokepoint that carries roughly 20% of global oil supply. Iran has threatened to close it during every period of tension since the 1980s. The difference this time was that Iran had spent years developing asymmetric capabilities: cheap drones, fast attack craft, sea mines, and a willingness to target commercial shipping that they'd already demonstrated through Houthi proxy operations in the Red Sea.
If the strikes happened, Iran would close the Strait. Not with a traditional naval blockade, but by making it uninsurable. A few drone strikes on tankers and Lloyd's pulls war risk coverage. No insurance means no transit. The physical waterway stays open. The financial layer shuts it down. I wrote about this mechanism on LinkedIn while it was playing out in real time.
That meant: oil spikes. Equities sell off on inflation fears and supply chain disruption. Crypto follows equities because the "digital gold" narrative is a fiction that dies every time actual risk shows up. The only question was timing.
The Instruments
I traded a combination of vehicles across multiple accounts.
SPY and QQQ equity puts with March, April, and May expirations. The March weeklies were short-dated, low-cost, high-leverage positions with one to two weeks until expiry. Cheap enough that they didn't need to be right every time, but when they hit, the return on premium was outsized. The April and May puts were the core bearish position on U.S. equities. I started accumulating on February 28, the day the strikes launched. The initial shock-and-recovery on March 2 showed me that the market was still in denial about the duration of the conflict. The S&P bounced back to nearly flat on the first day, which told me institutional money was buying the dip on muscle memory from prior Middle East conflicts. But this wasn't a one-week operation. Iran closed the Strait on March 4. That changed everything.
Micro-CL futures (crude oil). Long oil was the highest-conviction leg. WTI went from the $60s pre-war to $113 at its peak in early-to-mid March, then settled into a range between $84 and $101 as Trump's rhetoric whipsawed the market. Every time he posted about "productive conversations" or "pausing strikes," oil dropped. Every time Iran rejected negotiations or another tanker got hit, it surged. I traded the range rather than holding a static position.
Micro-ES futures (S&P 500 E-mini). Short equities via futures gave me more flexibility than options alone. I could scale in and out around Trump's social media posts without waiting for options pricing to adjust.
Micro-BTC futures. Short crypto. Bitcoin was trading around $74,000 in mid-March and showing the same pattern it always shows during genuine macro stress: correlated to equities, not inverse. The "store of value" thesis fails every time there's a real liquidity event. I shorted the bounces.
The Pattern
This is the part most people miss, and it's the part that connects trading to my day job.
I'm a systems architect. I build automation workflows, observability pipelines, and integration architectures. My job is to look at complex systems and identify the dependencies, feedback loops, and failure modes that aren't obvious from the surface.
Trump's market-moving behavior is a system. It has inputs, outputs, and a predictable cadence. He did it during his first term with China trade war tweets. He's doing it now with Iran.
The pattern:
- Escalate rhetoric or take military action.
- Markets react (oil up, equities down).
- Wait for maximum pain in headlines.
- Post something conciliatory on Truth Social.
- Markets reverse.
- Claim credit for the recovery.
- Repeat.
This is a feedback loop, not randomness. The "unpredictability" everyone talks about is itself predictable if you model it as a system rather than trying to decode his intentions as a person. I don't care what he thinks. I care what the system does.
On March 23, this pattern produced its most dramatic iteration yet. At 6:49 AM, 6,200 crude oil futures contracts traded in a single minute, a notional value of roughly $580 million. Fifteen minutes later, Trump posted about "productive conversations" with Iran. Oil cratered. Equities surged. Iran denied any negotiations were taking place.
I wasn't one of the traders at 6:49 AM. I don't have advance knowledge of presidential social media posts. But I didn't need it. The pattern was already established: every escalation would be followed by a de-escalation tweet. Every de-escalation tweet would be followed by reality reasserting itself. I positioned for the trend, not the individual tweet. When Trump talked, I took profits on short-term positions. When reality corrected the rhetoric, I re-entered.
The Discipline
I closed most positions before my price targets were reached. Consistently. This cost me money on several individual trades. It also meant I never held through a reversal that wiped out gains.
The temptation in a trending market is to let winners ride. I've learned the hard way that in a news-driven, politically manipulated market, the trend can reverse in the time it takes a 78-year-old man to pick up his phone. Tactical exits, partial profit-taking, and re-entry on confirmation beats conviction-holding every time in this environment.
I had no target dollar amount. Only target prices, volume readings, and an understanding of the news cycle. When oil hit $113 and I saw the volume profile thin out, I trimmed. When SPY bounced on a Trump post and I saw it fail to reclaim the prior day's high, I added to puts. When Bitcoin rallied to $75,000 on nothing but crypto-native hopium, I shorted it.
None of this required special access. It required watching the system, not the narrative.
The Conversion
$12,000 of the $39,800 went into instruments.
This might seem frivolous to someone who doesn't understand the project. I'm building a live electronic music performance under the name FAFO. Dawless, meaning no laptop on stage. Hardware synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, effects, all routed and performed in real time. The rig I built with these profits is the foundation of that project.
A Waldorf Iridium Desktop for polyphonic wavetable synthesis. An Erica Synths PERKONS HD-01, which is one of the most dynamic and raw-sounding drum machines in production. Erica Synths Hexdrums for additional rhythmic texture. An Intellijel Cascadia, a semi-modular analog synth that can go from precise melodic sequences to complete noise destruction. A Squarp Hapax, which is probably the most capable hardware sequencer on the market and the brain that ties it all together. A Denon DJ Prime 4+ for hybrid DJ/live sets. A Bastl Kastle 2 Wave Bard as a pocket-sized chaos generator.
Every one of these holds resale value. Several are limited production. The Iridium I found used for $1,700, well below retail. These aren't depreciating consumer purchases. They're tools that produce output and retain value on the secondary market.
The remaining $27,800 stays liquid because I'm unemployed and not stupid. But converting a portion of trading gains into productive hard assets while the gains are real, rather than letting them sit in a brokerage account tempting me to overtrade, is its own form of risk management.
The Systems Thinking Connection
Here's why this story belongs on a site called 60TB.tech and not a trading forum.
The skills that generated these returns are the same skills I use professionally. Dependency mapping: what happens downstream when this input changes? Failure mode analysis: where does this system break under stress? Pattern recognition across time: has this actor behaved this way before, and what happened next? Observability: what signals are the system actually producing versus what the marketing says it's producing?
At a former employer, I found a 60TB production database that had grown unchecked for years because nobody was watching the monitoring. The organization had effectively disabled its own observability. I flagged it. That story didn't end well for me, but it taught me something I've applied to everything since: systems tell you what's happening if you know where to look and you're willing to accept what you see.
The oil market told me what was happening. The options chain told me how to express the view. Trump's social media history told me the cadence. Iran's military doctrine told me the Strait would close. The insurance market told me it would stay closed. None of this was hidden. All of it was public.
The difference between seeing it and profiting from it is the willingness to act on your analysis when the consensus disagrees. That's true in trading, in architecture, and in pointing out that your employer's database is about to hit a hard limit.
I converted geopolitical pattern recognition into synthesizers. That's systems thinking across domains. That's what this site is about.