60TB.techI made $39,800 in 30 days trading the Iran war.
I didn't make it from insider knowledge, or because I had access to a Bloomberg terminal, and certainly not from a hedge fund's research desk. No, I did it from my desk and sometimes phone, here in Memphis, between job applications, jam sessions, interviews, and pondering my next moves. I used the same publicly available information that every retail trader, institutional analyst, and cable news pundit has access to. The main difference is that I was reading the system, rather than the headlines like most people. More importantly, I was willing to act on what I saw when the consensus told me I was wrong. In other words—I put my money where my analyses concluded.
That's all well and good, but "here comes another jackass r/wallstreetbets trader bro to blather about his phat gainz," many of you will say. No, not exactly. The result matters because money management is at least half of good trading. You have to have formulated your own Dopamine Regulatory Structure to actually make it out of the system with more money than you came in with—and this is especially true when you're someone that's got high conviction, but not a lot of income.
Music is my thing. One of my things. But a big thing of things. It's not particularly lucrative unless you've hit it big. Even then, if you lack a DRS, you'll go broke. I've had some brushes with the big leagues, but in the end, I'm just a bedroom producer. However, after a stint of writer's block and demotivation, I've recently had a surge of inspiration and the desire to get back on the train—but I wanted to approach it differently. I've long used a combination of outboard hardware with my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software (Ableton Live, for me), but having spent way too much of the last 30 years of my life toiling away on a computer, I needed to get away from a screen. And that's exactly the sort of thing trader-bro gainz are good for: not getting richer, but to treat yourself (and those in your orbit).
So, I built out the additions to my studio that I wanted, firmly intent with being able to easily lift a handful of devices from the studio setup into a live centerpiece for my ongoing FAFO events here in Memphis.
I took a chunk of the profits and significantly expanded my DAW-less electronic music performance rig. A Waldorf Iridium Desktop, Erica Synths PERKONS HD-01 and Hexdrums. An Intellijel Cascadia, Squarp Hapax. For the DJ gigs with my crew, I finally got a digital controller, rather than lug around turntables, so I picked up a Denon DJ Prime 4+ (in wedding white, no less). Bastl Kastle 2 Wave Bard (what a nutty little bro). Pro Co Rat 2 distortion pedal (nasty). Premium cabling, stands, and mounting hardware for the whole setup. About $12,000 in hard assets that hold resale value and serve a creative project I've been dreaming about for years. The remaining balance of my student loans can wait. It's time to focus on FAFO.
The remaining $27,800 stayed liquid, because I was laid off in January and I'm not reckless. Inspired, maybe. Reckless, no.
The Thesis (it's time to get serious)
By mid-February 2026, the trade was sitting right there for anyone paying attention and willing to connect the dots between markets, foreign policy, and insurance. The indexes had been grinding along for 6 months, going nowhere. It had been nearly a year since Trump's tariff terror on the markets.
The US and Israel had been telegraphing military action against Iran for months. They coordinated the MOAB strike during the summer of 2025, but you just knew that wasn't the end of it. The diplomatic track through Oman was producing nothing of substance, and if you've followed Trump's playbook since his first term like I have, you already know the pattern: provoke, escalate, make an announcement to de-escalate, take credit for the market turnaround, and depending on where in the event cycle we're in, potentially lather, rinse, and repeat. It's the same cycle he ran with the China Tariffs, North Korea, and even Iran in 2020 (remember the Rod of God assassination of Iran's general in January of 2020?). The market had priced in some war risk, but it wasn't enough for what was actually coming. Crude was sitting in the low $60s. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 were near all-time highs, but grinding. The VIX was snoozing. Having seen it all before, and knowing nothing is ever as it seems, the odds of incoming chaos were high.
The Strait of Hormuz—a 21-mile-wide chokepoint that carries roughly 20 percent of global oil supply—is Iran's primary bargaining chip, and it's threatened to close it during every period of tension since the 1980s. So, historically, the market has learned to shrug off those threats. But as they say, this time it's different. Iran had spent decades developing asymmetric capabilities like cheap drones, fast attack craft, and sea mines. The kind of plentiful munitions needed for the only strategy truly viable against the US and its wizard of Oz, Israel. Iran had already shown it was ready to target commercial shipping through its Houthi proxy operations in the Red Sea. The capability was proven, the doctrine established, and the only remaining variable was political will. That will materialized instantly upon the obliteration of its leadership by the joint US-Israel opening salvos.
If strikes happened—and I was betting they would—Iran would close the Strait. Not with a traditional naval blockade (they haven't got the navy for that, and they know it), but by making the waterway uninsurable. That's the part nobody on FinTwit was talking about, and it's the part that actually mattered. You don't need to sink a ship to shut down a shipping lane. You just need to hit one or two tankers with a cheap drone, and Lloyd's pulls the war risk coverage for the entire region. Once the insurance is gone, the ships don't sail. Doesn't matter if the water is technically open—no P&I club is writing that policy, and no shipowner is sending a VLCC through without it. The physical waterway stays open while the financial layer shuts it down. I wrote about this mechanism on LinkedIn while it was playing out in real time, and the response from people actually working in shipping and marine insurance confirmed I wasn't just making this up in my head.
So the trade thesis more or less wrote itself: oil spikes hard on supply disruption, equities sell off on inflation fears and supply chain chaos, and crypto follows equities lower because the "digital gold" pitch is a fairy tale that dies every single time actual risk shows up (and I mean every time—go look at BTC during COVID, during the SVB collapse, during the tariff shock, it sells off with everything else). The only question was timing, and Trump's rhetoric was giving me a pretty good clock to work with.
The Instruments
I traded a combination of vehicles in a few different accounts, and I want to be specific here because vague trading stories are worthless. If someone tells you they "made money on the Iran war" and can't tell you what they traded, they're lying to you.
SPY and QQQ equity puts with March, April, and May expirations. The March weeklies were the short-dated, low-cost, high-leverage lottery tickets—a week or two until expiry, cheap enough that any individual position didn't need to work, but when they hit on a down day the return on premium was outsized. Think of them as cheap insurance on my thesis with convex payoff potential. The April and May puts were the core bearish position where most of the capital sat. I started accumulating on February 28—the day the strikes launched. The initial shock-and-recovery on March 2 was actually the most informative data point of the entire trade, because the S&P bounced back to nearly flat on day one. That told me institutional money was buying the dip on pure muscle memory. Every prior Middle East conflict in recent memory—the Gulf wars, Libya, even the Soleimani assassination in 2020—produced a dip that got bought and recovered within weeks. The algos and the portfolio managers were pattern-matching to that template. But this wasn't a weekend bombing run followed by a ceasefire. Iran closed the Strait on March 4, and the dip-buyers were about to find out the hard way that their historical template was wrong.
Micro-CL futures for crude oil. Long oil was the highest-conviction leg of everything I was doing, and the one where I felt I had the clearest informational edge (not insider info—just a better read on the insurance mechanism than the consensus). WTI went from the low $60s pre-war to $113 at its peak in early-to-mid March, then settled into a volatile range between $84 and $101 as Trump's rhetoric kept whipsawing the price. Every time he posted about "productive conversations" or "pausing strikes," oil would drop several dollars in minutes. Every time Iran rejected the talks or another tanker caught a drone, it surged right back. Rather than sitting in a static long and white-knuckling through the volatility, I traded the range—booking profits on the spikes, re-entering on the dips that Trump's Truth Social posts reliably manufactured. Was I leaving money on the table? Absolutely. But I was also never holding through a full reversal, which matters more when you're trading with money you actually need.
Micro-ES futures on the S&P 500 E-mini. Shorting equities via futures rather than just relying on puts gave me the flexibility to scale in and out around Trump's posts in real time. Options have their own pricing dynamics—implied volatility, theta decay, bid-ask spreads that widen during fast moves—and when a single Truth Social post can move the S&P 50 points in fifteen minutes, you need something that moves tick-for-tick with the underlying. That's what the micro-ES gave me.
Micro-BTC futures. Short crypto. Bitcoin was sitting around $74,000 in mid-March and doing exactly what it always does during genuine macro stress: trading in lockstep with equities, not inverse to them. I've been hearing the "store of value" and "digital gold" arguments for a decade now, and the thesis crumbles every single time there's a real liquidity crunch or an actual economic shock. People sell their Bitcoin to cover margin calls and pay rent, same as they sell everything else. That's not a knock on BTC as a technology or even as a long-term speculation—it's just the reality of how it trades when things get ugly. I shorted the bounces, particularly the rally to $75,000 that was driven by nothing except crypto Twitter hopium and influencer cope.
The Pattern
Here's the part I think most people miss, and it's the part that ties what I was doing in my brokerage to what I do for a living.
My day job (when I have one) is systems architecture. I build automation workflows, observability pipelines, integration architectures—the plumbing that makes an organization's tools actually talk to each other and behave predictably under load. The core of that work, if you strip away the technical jargon, is looking at complicated systems and figuring out where the dependencies are, where the feedback loops hide, and where the thing is going to break when you stress it. It's not glamorous, but it trains your brain to see patterns in how systems behave under pressure—and a market during wartime is just another system under pressure.
Trump's market-moving behavior is a system. It has inputs and outputs and a cadence you can set your watch to if you're paying attention. He ran the same playbook with China tariff tweets in 2018 and 2019—fire off a tweet, market drops, walk it back two days later, market recovers, take a victory lap. He did it with North Korea. He's doing it with Iran now, and the playbook hasn't changed because it doesn't need to. Why fix what works?
The cycle goes something like: escalate rhetoric or launch a military action. Markets react accordingly—oil up, stocks down. Let the headlines marinate at maximum pain for a day or two. Then post something conciliatory on Truth Social about "productive conversations" or "willingness to negotiate." Markets reverse on the headline. Take credit for the recovery. Depending on where we are in the broader conflict timeline, repeat.
That's not randomness. That's a feedback loop. The "unpredictability" that every pundit loves to attribute to this administration is itself remarkably predictable once you stop trying to psychoanalyze the man and start modeling it as a system. I genuinely do not care what Trump thinks or what his actual intentions are on any given morning. I care about what the system does when he interacts with it, because the system is what moves prices.
On March 23, this feedback loop produced maybe its most dramatic cycle yet. At 6:49 AM New York time, roughly 6,200 crude oil futures contracts traded in a single minute—about $580 million notional, against an average of 700 contracts for that time slot over the prior five trading days. Fifteen minutes later, Trump posted about "productive conversations" with Iran. Oil cratered. Equities surged. Iran denied any negotiations were taking place. I wrote about this specific incident in my previous piece on the Iran trade scandal, so I won't rehash the whole thing here—but the part that's relevant to this story is simpler: I didn't need to be one of the traders at 6:49 AM with apparent advance knowledge. I didn't need a heads up on presidential social media posts. The pattern was already established. Every escalation gets followed by a de-escalation post. Every de-escalation post gets followed by reality reasserting itself within days. I positioned for the trend and traded around the noise. When Trump talked, I booked profits on short-term positions. When reality corrected the rhetoric, I re-entered. Rinse, repeat, 30 days.
The Discipline
I want to be honest about this part, because the $39,800 number might give you the impression I was swinging for the fences on every trade. I wasn't. Not even close.
I closed most positions before my price targets were reached. Every time. That absolutely cost me money on individual trades where the move kept going well past my exit—and I'd be lying if I said it didn't sting watching oil run another $5 after I'd already booked profits. But it also meant I never once held through one of those sudden reversals that wipes out a week of gains in an hour, and in this particular market, that's the discipline that matters more. I've been trading options and futures seriously for about two years now, and the single most expensive lesson those two years taught me is that in a market being actively manipulated by political announcements, the trend can reverse in the time it takes a 78-year-old man to pick up his phone and thumb out something provocative. You have to be tactical. Partial profit-taking, re-entry on confirmation, and the emotional maturity to watch a position keep running after you've exited without chasing it back in. That last part is the hardest, honestly.
I had no target dollar amount at any point. Just target prices, volume patterns, and a running mental model of how the contrived news cycle was being used to engineer moves. When oil hit $113 and the volume profile thinned out at the top (fewer participants willing to buy at those levels), I trimmed. When SPY bounced on a Trump post but couldn't reclaim the prior day's high on declining volume, I added to puts. When Bitcoin rallied to $75,000 on nothing but hopium and influencer cope, I shorted it.
None of this required anything that you or anyone else doesn't already have access to. It just required watching the system rather than the talking heads, and being OK with acting on what you see even when most people are telling you you're wrong. That's harder than it sounds when you're unemployed and trading with money that actually matters to you.
The Conversion
$12,000 of the $39,800 went into instruments. If you read the intro, you already know why. But let me put a finer point on the money management angle, because I think it's the part of this story that most people in the trading world would actually disagree with me on.
I already had the bones of a live rig before any of this started—an Elektron Digitakt, two Acidlabs Basslines, a Make Noise Strega, and a handful of other pieces I've accumulated over the years. What the $12,000 bought was the expansion that turned a modest bedroom setup into something I can actually perform full live sets with and transport to the venue without a nervous breakdown.
The Waldorf Iridium Desktop handles the polyphonic stuff—pads, textures, evolving soundscapes. I found it used for $1,700, which is well under the $2,500+ retail, and the kind of deal that only materializes when you've got cash on hand and don't need to wait for a paycheck to clear. The PERKONS HD-01 from Erica Synths is the rhythmic backbone, and if you've never heard one, it sounds like an industrial drum machine that somehow also has soul. The Hexdrums complement it without stepping on it. The Intellijel Cascadia is the wild card—semi-modular, so it can be a precision melodic sequencer or a complete noise machine depending on how you patch it on any given night. The Squarp Hapax is arguably the most capable hardware sequencer currently being manufactured, and it's what lets me arrange and sequence a full set without ever opening a laptop. The Denon Prime 4+ is for the DJ gigs with my crew (in wedding white, because why not). The Bastl Kastle 2 is a pocket-sized chaos machine that cost almost nothing and makes sounds nothing else in the rig can produce (what a nutty little bro). And the Rat 2 is there for when something needs to sound like it's being fed through a broken amplifier, which in techno is more often than you'd think (nasty).
Then the infrastructure—Headliner two-tier and three-tier XL stands, a 55-degree desktop stand, Gator X-stand, clampable shelf, Ultimate Support MDS-100 modular stand. Not exciting. But the ergonomics of a hardware rig matter way more than people realize. If you can't reach your gear comfortably during a two-hour set, you'll stop reaching for it, and then you're just standing behind a table pressing play, which defeats the entire point of going DAW-less.
Every one of these instruments holds its value on the secondary market. Some are limited production. None of them are depreciating consumer electronics that crater the moment you open the box. They're tools that produce creative output, and if I ever need to liquidate, I'll get most of my money back. That matters when you're between jobs.
The remaining $27,800 stays liquid because I'm not currently employed and I'm not delusional about the job market. But here's the thing about converting a chunk of trading profits into physical gear rather than letting it all sit in the brokerage account: cash in a brokerage account is ammunition, and when you're a trader with high conviction and a hot hand, ammunition is dangerous. Every dollar sitting in that account whispers "put me to work" at 2 AM when you're looking at overnight futures and convincing yourself you see a pattern. Taking $12,000 off the table and turning it into synthesizers on a desk is, paradoxically, one of the most disciplined financial decisions I've made this year. It's capital that can't be overtraded. It can only make music.
Why This Belongs Here
So why does this story live on a site called 60TB.tech instead of r/wallstreetbets?
Because the skills that produced these returns are the same ones I bill for when I'm working as a systems architect and strategic advisor. It's the same set of questions I ask regardless of the domain. If this input changes, what breaks downstream? Under pressure, where does this system crack first? Has this actor behaved this way before, and what happened in the aftermath? And the big one—what signals is the system actually producing versus what the marketing material or the press release or the Truth Social post says it's producing?
At a former employer, I identified significant technical debt related to a 60TB PostgreSQL database hosted on AWS RDS, often hitting the hard 64TB ceiling. That's the kind of foundational systems design problem that should have been addressed before the application ever went to production. Instead it was either intentionally overlooked for the sake of going to market as quickly as possible—or the engineers in charge didn't read the documentation or have the knowledge to properly implement in the first place. The organization had effectively disabled its own observability, and when I flagged the problem, the story didn't end well for me. But it taught me something that I've applied to literally everything since: systems tell you what's happening if you know where to look and you're OK with accepting what you see, even when accepting it is uncomfortable and potentially career-limiting. That lesson cost me a job. It also made me $39,800 when I applied it to a different system a year later.
The oil market told me what was happening. The options chain told me how to express the view. Trump's social media history gave me the cadence and the clock. Iran's military doctrine told me the Strait would close. The insurance market told me it would stay closed. None of this was hidden behind a paywall or a security clearance. All of it was sitting right there, out in the open, for anyone who cared to look at more than one domain at a time rather than staying neatly in their lane.
The gap between seeing it and profiting from it is being prepared to act when the consensus disagrees with you—and to keep acting, trade after trade, day after day, even when individual positions go against you in the short term. That's as true in trading as it is in architecture, and it was true when I was standing in front of a whiteboard at my former employer, trying to explain to people who didn't want to hear it that their database was about to hit a hard limit.
I converted wartime pattern recognition into synthesizers. That's what I do. I see the system, I act on what I see, and I put the proceeds into things that matter to me. If that's not what this site is about, I don't know what is.
The Full Gear List
Instruments
Waldorf Iridium Desktop Mk2
Erica Synths PERKONS HD-01
Erica Synths Hexdrums
Intellijel Cascadia
Squarp Hapax
Denon DJ Prime 4+
Bastl Kastle 2 Wave Bard
Pro Co Rat 2
Stands & Mounting
Headliner 2-Tier XL Stand
Headliner 3-Tier XL Stand
Headliner Desktop Production Stand (55°)
Gator X-Stand Tabletop Set
Gator Clampable Laptop Stand
Ultimate Support MDS-100