Green Lumber Fallacy

I sometimes think of the Green Lumber Fallacy and how the trader thought that the lumber was painted green instead of being freshly cut, yet he traded it as a profession.

So let us call the green lumber fallacy the situation in which one mistakes a source of visible knowledge — the greenness of lumber — for another, less visible from the outside, less tractable, less narratable.

Argus Sour Crude Index was launched in 2009 as it served better than the Cushing's WTI which had deviated from fundamentals of the oil market due to bottlenecks in shipping. Refiners in the Midwest that no doubt Tesoro probably owned a few operated with a spread between the indexes and what they could refine to sell. I remembered that in 2010 era looking at the Brent or WTI prices to drop to allieviate margins as I was invested in Tesoro. I was not looking at the right thing possibly. My knowledge was not as encompassing as it should have been, but maybe the value was the replacement cost and the moat of an irreplaceable asset due to NIMBY. As Kirkegard said, "Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forward."