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Two tracks. Institutional research on energy chokepoints, defense procurement and sovereign capital — and a foundations track for allocators still building the machinery underneath. Everything is sold outright. No advisory relationship, no signal group.
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Each is standalone and delivered instantly. The research track assumes you already allocate; the foundations track builds that capability from the start.
Energy macro intelligence for people who move capital — oil, geopolitics and sovereign flows, written straight. Read it before you buy anything else.
One chokepoint, fully mapped. The escalation ladder with observable triggers, bypass capacity route by route, and why the permit regime matters more than reopening.
How an energy book is actually framed — the curve structures, spreads and inventory signals a desk reads before it takes a view, and the ones it ignores.
The rearmament cycle read from the budget line down: which programs are funded through the decade, who holds the backlog, and where the industrial base physically cannot expand.
How the largest state allocators are mandated, what they disclose, how they have rotated — and how to read their filings as a forward indicator rather than a history lesson.
The five systems you're already running whether or not you've named them — income, reserve, deployment, protection, compounding. Naming them is what makes them fixable.
A working tracker for the distance between where your capital is and where it needs to be. Numbers you update, not advice you read once.
The groundwork: how capital is structured, what it costs to hold, and the sequence decisions have to happen in before any position makes sense.
For the reader who has the framework and still hasn't acted. Walks the distance between understanding a thesis and actually holding something.
The full foundations track in one place — the systems, the sequence and the application, taught end to end rather than in pieces.
DESK REFERENCE
The questions people are actually searching, answered with the part most coverage leaves out: what each answer does to price.
No. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed in effect since late February 2026, when the United States and Israel began strikes on Iran. Iran has enforced the closure by attacking vessels attempting transit, and the United States has run a naval blockade alongside an escort operation.
Closed does not mean empty. Traffic has become conditional rather than absent — some vessels move by permit, some under escort, some dark with tracking disabled. Weekly transit counts have run at a fraction of pre-war levels, recovering and collapsing again with each round of attacks.
This page is a reference, not a live tracker. For current status check maritime advisories; for the framework that tells you what a change in status is worth, see the Playbook.
Status has not reverted. What changes week to week is how much moves through, not whether the closure holds — permitted and escorted transits rise between strike rounds and collapse after them, which is why the same question gets a different-sounding answer depending on the week it is asked.
Treat any single day's headline as a data point in that pattern rather than a turning point. The durable signal is in war-risk insurance quotes and escort availability, both of which move before the news does.
Closure is leverage, not strategy. Iran cannot match the strike campaign directly, so it applies cost to the one variable every counterparty prices: the movement of Gulf crude and LNG through a single passage.
The mechanism is cheap on Iran's side — mines, fast-attack craft, anti-ship missiles and drones from its own coastline — and expensive on everyone else's, because insurance, escort and rerouting costs land on cargo owners rather than on the party imposing them.
No one owns it. The waterway runs between Iran to the north and Oman to the south, and both inbound and outbound shipping lanes sit inside Omani territorial waters at the narrowest point, under a traffic separation scheme.
Control in practice is a different question from control in law. Iran's coastline, islands and missile coverage give it the ability to make transit conditional; the United States Fifth Fleet and coalition escorts give the other side the ability to make transit possible. What moves is decided by that balance, not by title.
It is an international strait, which is not the same thing as international waters. The lanes lie within territorial seas, but the Law of the Sea grants transit passage through straits used for international navigation, and that right is not supposed to be suspendable.
Iran signed the convention and never ratified it, and has long argued the right belongs only to parties — the legal seam the current closure is run through. For pricing purposes the entitlement matters less than the escort: law describes who may pass, underwriters decide what passing costs.
About 21 nautical miles at its narrowest point. The usable part is much narrower: two shipping lanes of roughly two miles each, separated by a buffer, because draft and depth rule out most of the remaining water for loaded tankers.
That is the whole reason the chokepoint is a chokepoint. A passage this narrow cannot be widened, escorted around, or replaced at the volumes involved — roughly a fifth of global oil consumption moved through it before the war.
Deep enough for the largest loaded tankers, and not by a wide margin. Depths in the transit lanes run on the order of 55 to 60 metres at the shallow end, against a laden VLCC draft of roughly 22.
The number that matters is not average depth but usable depth inside the lanes, because that is what forces every loaded tanker into the same corridor. Mines and lane denial work here precisely because there is no deeper alternative to route around them.
Because nothing substitutes for it at volume. Roughly a fifth of the world's oil consumption and a comparable share of seaborne LNG moved through a few miles of water before the war, most of it heading to Asia.
It is also the shortest lever in the region. Any actor able to make transit uncertain can move global prices without matching anyone's military, which is why the strait shows up in every Gulf escalation regardless of what the fighting is nominally about.
Before the closure, roughly 100 to 120 vessel movements a day, including 30 to 40 laden tankers carrying about 20 million barrels of crude and products. Since late February 2026 the count has run at a fraction of that, rising between strike rounds and falling after them.
No public number is exact right now. Transit counts are built from AIS, and a meaningful share of vessels are moving with transponders off, so trackers undercount the dark fleet and overcount confidence. Use the trend, not the day.
Price moves before barrels do. The first reprice is risk premium and paper: front-month crude, then time spreads, as the market pays for prompt supply that is already outside the Gulf.
Freight and insurance follow within days — war risk premiums on hulls and cargo, then tanker day rates as tonnage repositions. Physical differentials move last and matter most, because they show which grades are genuinely short rather than which headlines are loudest.
The sequence is the tradeable part. Reading it in the wrong order is how positions get taken at the top of a premium that decays.
Partly, and not for everyone. Saudi Arabia's East-West line to the Red Sea and the UAE's line from Habshan to Fujairah are the two that matter at scale, and together their nameplate capacity covers only a fraction of normal transit volumes.
Nameplate is not throughput. Bypass routes have their own vulnerabilities, sustained flow runs below rated capacity, and the crude that clears them is not the same grade mix buyers were contracted for. Kuwait, Qatar and Iraq's southern exports have no meaningful pipeline alternative at all — Qatari LNG has none whatsoever.
Reopening is a gradient, not a switch. Once transit is granted case by case — by permit, by escort convoy, by flag or by counterparty — the strait can be functionally open for some cargoes and closed for others on the same day.
For pricing, that is the point. The market will not get a clean reopening headline to trade; it gets a slow change in who is allowed through and at what cost, which shows up in insurance quotes and transit counts well before it shows up in policy statements.
REFERENCE CURRENT TO MID-AUGUST 2026 · SOURCES CITED IN FULL IN THE PLAYBOOK
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