The falling oil price is not yet delivering the hit to broader market sentiment that it did in the first few months of the year.

When was diving towards its 12-year low of about $27 a barrel in January, it was causing a right old kerfuffle in the stock market.

But Brent’s roughly 15 per cent retreat from its high of $52.80 last month coincides with Wall Street at a record high.

Why? What is the difference this time?

Well, first off, the latest dip — a few sharp up-and-down daily moves aside — has been fairly orderly.

Traders are not panicking because they have already been through a plunge to much lower levels and know the playbook.

They know, for example, that the market’s automatic stabiliser works quite well. If oil prices fall much lower, US rigs will start to be mothballed again and production will ease.

Billions of dollars worth of investments have already been shelved by oil companies.

Also, there should be less uncertainty about how lower oil prices transmit through the economy.

In particular, at the start of the year there was much fear that banks were badly exposed to energy-based credit.

It now seems those worries were overdone. The most vulnerable energy companies will have been culled.

Strategas Research notes that the latest pullback in oil prices has not led to any “meaningful deterioration” in spreads for the high-yield energy bond sector.