If you put $10,000 into United States Oil Fund (NYSEARCA:USO) on the last trading day of 2025, when it closed at $69.16, you were sitting on roughly $19,800 by the close on June 2, 2026, with USO at $137.27. The same $10,000 in SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY | SPY Price Prediction) would be worth about $11,140, since SPY went from $681.92 to $759.57 over the same window. One position roughly doubled. The other did what the S&P 500 normally does in a decent year, packed into five months.
USO is up roughly 98% year to date. SPY is up about 11%. The headline rounded both down a touch, which is fine. The point holds either way. Crude was the trade in 2026, and the equity index that everyone benchmarks to barely registered the move.
The arithmetic, with one important caveat
USO is a commodity pool that holds near-month West Texas Intermediate futures and rolls them forward as each contract approaches expiry, distinct from both equity energy funds and spot crude. That distinction matters because the spot price of WTI itself rose from $57.21 on January 2, 2026 to $97.63 on May 26, 2026, a YTD gain of 70.6%. USO returned more than that, which tells you the futures curve was in backwardation for much of the run, meaning the front-month contract traded above later-dated contracts and each roll added a small tailwind rather than a drag. When oil is screaming higher on supply fear, that is exactly the curve shape you get, and it is the friend of any fund forced to roll month after month.
The peak of the move was sharper than the YTD number suggests. Spot WTI hit $114.58 on April 7, 2026, the 12-month high. USO has already given back some of that, falling about 4% in the past month as crude pulled back from the spring blowoff. The doubling happened. The reader who bought in late April is already down.
What actually did the work
Two things stacked on top of each other. The first was a real supply shock. The EIA’s May 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook describes a Strait of Hormuz that has been "largely at a standstill, both because of the risk of attacks on oil tankers as well as a new U.S. blockade against Iranian oil shipments through the strait", with the agency estimating that global oil inventories would fall by an average of 8.5 million b/d in 2Q26 and projecting Brent around $106 per barrel in May and June. OPEC+ production, which had been running near 33.91 million b/d in Q4 2025, collapsed to a forecast 26.01 million b/d in Q2 2026. That is supply that physically could not get to market.
The second was the demand response, which was smaller than the supply hit. EIA cut its 2026 global oil demand growth forecast to 0.2 million b/d, down from 0.6 million b/d in last month’s STEO and 1.2 million b/d in the February STEO. Demand softened, but not nearly fast enough to absorb a several-million-barrel-a-day production hole. Price did the rest.
On the screens, the catalyst showed up as a March VIX spike to 31.05 on March 27, 2026, which is high-fear territory, while oil ripped higher. By the time the equity market figured out the world had not ended, the VIX was back to 16.05, in the low-volatility complacency range. The fear that drove oil never really showed up in stocks for more than a few weeks. SPY’s 5.4% one-month return tells you equities have already moved on. The energy story did not.
Why the Reddit fight is the right fight
The retail debate landed exactly where you would want it to land. Two posts on r/wallstreetbets in May framed the disagreement in identical language. One was titled "In 20k of USO puts because 150 dollar oil is fking stupid" and pulled 1,956 upvotes and 426 comments. The other, "In 19k of USO calls because 150 dollar oil is fking stupid", drew 441 upvotes. Same premise, opposite trade. The bearish side got roughly four times the engagement, which is a decent proxy for where the crowd is leaning after a near-double.
The forward look, written like a friend would say it
The mechanism that produced USO’s run was a physical supply disruption layered onto an OPEC+ production cliff. That is regime-dependent in the strongest sense of the term. The conditions for a repeat are narrow: a specific chokepoint staying closed and a specific cartel staying off the bid. Both are reversible on a single headline. EIA itself is modeling that traffic through the Strait of Hormuz gradually begins to resume in June and shut-in oil production gradually returns, which is the soft start to the unwind. The pullback from $114 in early April to $97 by late May is consistent with that.
There is also the structural drag that USO never escapes. Over ten years, USO is up about 45% while SPY is up roughly 261%. That gap exists because the futures curve spends most of its life in contango, which means each monthly roll quietly clips the fund. The backwardation that supercharged the 2026 run is the exception, not the rule. The instant the curve flips, USO’s tailwind becomes a headwind even if spot crude trades sideways.
If you want to know whether to keep paying attention, four data points carry the weight. WTI front-month price and the shape of the CME futures curve are the first two, and they are linked. Backwardation alongside a high spot price means the squeeze is still on. Contango with a falling spot price means the trade is over and the bleed has started. The third is the OPEC+ meeting cadence, where any signal that the group is preparing to bring barrels back will hit USO before it hits anything else. The fourth is the EIA weekly crude inventory report, which gives you a real-time read on whether stocks are still drawing or starting to build.
The honest read is the one the retail puts buyer wrote in his post title. A near-double in five months is what it is, and the conditions that produced it are already weakening at the edges. SPY’s 11% looks small next to USO’s 98%, but SPY did not need a closed shipping lane to get there. USO did. Watch the curve and the strait. When either turns, the math turns with it.
Top Gaining Stocks
Top Losing Stocks