The Retail Investor Who Turned $5,000 Into $400,000 on Energy Stocks During the Iran Crisis

I’ve been attempting to determine the degree of veracity of a story that has been circulating in trading forums this spring. It’s the kind that is repeated with slightly different numbers every time. According to the version I keep hearing, a Texas software engineer with no Wall Street background used the energy spike brought on by the Iran crisis to turn about $5,000 into nearly $400,000 in ten weeks. In the few message threads where he has shared screenshots, he goes by Daniel. He refuses to participate in interviews. However, the time-stamped and largely redacted trade tickets he has shared seem to match the public record.

The chokepoint was what he saw, presumably before most institutional desks priced it in appropriately. Since late February, the Strait of Hormuz has been practically closed, and the cost of shipping insurance has increased to the point where most tanker routes are no longer viable. Brent continued to push past ninety, then toward a hundred. It was referred to as a temporary dislocation by the talking heads. According to Daniel’s own account in an early March thread, he didn’t think it would end for weeks. Quarters, he thought. The rest of the trade depends on that one belief—that the backlog itself, not just the conflict, would keep prices high.

He began modestly. A smaller position in Occidental and a few thousand dollars’ worth of January 2027 calls on Shell when the stock was in the high seventies. Not very fancy. The work was done by the leverage. Daniel was rolling profits into more contracts by the third week of March, when all retail traders briefly became net sellers for the first time since 2023. Vanda Research identified this as a real shift in sentiment. On paper, this type of behavior appears to be reckless. It appears to be conviction in retrospect. Most of the time, the distinction between those two is made after the fact.

When these tales come up, it’s common to treat them like parables. Either the lucky lottery winner who is about to return everything, or the lone genius who saw what the suits missed. The two framings seem a bit too tidy. Observing this specific run in action reveals a messier reality. Daniel has made mistakes in the past; he wrote about a harsh call on natural gas in 2024 that wiped out the majority of his prior gains. The energy trade itself involved a number of smaller decisions, each of which required him to hold through days when the position was deeply in the red. His account fell about 40% in a session on the morning of March 24, when Trump floated negotiations and oil briefly plummeted. He grasped.

To their credit, the experts made the same setup call. In mid-March, Ninepoint’s Eric Nuttall told the Wall Street Journal that integrated majors provided significant operational leverage to a stable price floor. As recently as this week, Michael Khouw of CNBC described a cash-secured put trade on Shell. The thesis was not concealed. If the story is true, what set Daniel apart was his willingness to size into it without taking the professional risk of making a mistake on someone else’s money. Hedge funds had to hedge. He didn’t.

According to the most recent screenshots, he’s mostly out these days. Instead of chasing the next leg, they locked in yield by rotating into shorter-dated income trades on the same names and taking the kind of two-percent-credit puts Khouw described. The inventories take time to replenish, regardless of whether the conflict de-escalates or continues—that aspect of the thesis remains unchanged. His cushion has changed. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that those with the best information weren’t the ones who profited the most from this disruption. They were the first to take it seriously.