Well that wraps up the episode The oil market briefly jumped earlier when the UAE sent out this message to resident cell phones. That was amplified by a report of explosions -- untrue -- in Iran's media. The alert was withdrawn just 2 minutes after it was issued and now it all appears to have been some kind of technical mistake. The officials are calling it a "technical malfunction" but it seems near-impossible to me that a human wouldn't have been in the loop somewhere or that it was some kind of test that went wrong. In any case, oil quickly rose $1 on it but the market sorted it out fairly quickly. Oil intraday (full story)