Peace got more likely. The sea lane got further away.

**The weekend the strait changed category.**

For most of the summer the Gulf has been traded through a template that every desk knows. A waterway is disrupted, supply is withheld, the barrel reprices, and the whole structure unwinds when the politics resolve. The template implies a specific sequence: the deal comes, the premium fades, the ships sail. Through Friday, the market was still broadly trading that sequence. US equities closed their best week since April, crude drifted below its summer high, and negotiators were reported to be closing in on an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Then Iran attached new conditions, said Washington must move first, and replaced the official leading its side of the talks. The WSJ's account is that the White House had believed a reopening was imminent and was met instead with a demand for major concessions.

What happened next inside our own data is the reason for this note. The engine's probability layer marked down every Hormuz reopening horizon it carries — the mid-August date, the end-August date, September, and December — on a single day, while both of its ceasefire horizons rose. The direction of each individual move is unsurprising given the news. The fact that the far-dated ones moved with the near ones is not, and it is the whole point. A market that expects a delay marks down the near date and leaves the horizon alone. A market that has changed its mind about the nature of the problem marks down the horizon too. That is what it did.

Two independent readings support the same conclusion, and they matter more than the narrative does. The first is a non-event: the band on US crude reserves drawing down stayed low and flat all week. A blockade that genuinely starves the market of oil should register there, and it has not — which points at a closure being absorbed by re-routing, at cost, rather than one creating scarcity. That reading is corroborated by reporting that analysts cannot account for the barrels that ought to be missing. The second is the metals. On Saturday this brief committed in advance to a test: gold holding through a genuine de-escalation headline would confirm a monetary bid, gold falling with crude would expose a war premium. Peace odds improved over the weekend and the metals gave back nothing. What they have been tracking is on the record in the same week's coverage — an inflation debate about whether the next move is a rise, and a contested Fed.

The honest limits, and they are not small. A Sunday spot mark is thin, so the metals observation is one data point and today's session is the real test. An inference drawn from a band that did not move is weaker than one drawn from a band that did. Our positioning table still dates to 4 August, so the distillate and silver readings from earlier in the week are carried forward as open questions rather than restated as fresh evidence — the next Commitments of Traders release on 14 August is their dated test. And the central claim here concerns the category the market has assigned to the closure, not the direction of flat price, which we are not calling.

Yesterday's brief argued that the ceasefire and the waterway had become two different contracts, and quoted them eighty-one points apart on a single deadline. That call is confirmed and has widened to eighty-nine points, and it widened from both ends at once. We are extending it rather than repeating it: the separation is no longer about one date.