The Quick Answer: As of September 9, 2026, at about 11 a.m. Eastern, Kalshi's first rung on the 2026 WTI high, a settle above $115, trades at 27.7 bid and 29.5 ask. That ask is a tenth of a cent above the 9 p.m. Tuesday quote, which already had US Central Command's confirmation of five destroyed Iranian tankers in it, and seven-tenths above the 4 p.m. book, which did not. Iran's missiles at a base in Jordan and Brent's first trade above $100 since July came after both. Eight AI models re-priced the whole ladder price-blind Wednesday morning and average 40% on that first rung, about 10 points above the ask. The full ten-rung board, the rung the tanker war did reprice, and where the eight seats split are below.
The tanker war escalated overnight and the oil market answered in the morning. US Central Command said late Tuesday that American forces had destroyed five Iranian crude tankers, four of them in the Gulf of Oman and one near Kharg Island, Iran's main export terminal, after Iran's Revolutionary Guard twice fired ballistic missiles at a US Navy warship over the prior two days, Al Jazeera reported. Iran fired about 20 ballistic missiles at the Al-Azraq air base in Jordan around 10 p.m. Eastern; Jordan said it intercepted 18, per NBC News. By the time New York opened, Brent, the global benchmark, had traded above $100 for the first time since July, and printed as high as $101.54; its last settle above $100 was July 23. WTI, the American benchmark, traded near $96.20 at 11 a.m., up about $3.17 from Tuesday's $93.03 settle, which Reuters called the third straight up day and the highest close since June 4; the figures here are Yahoo Finance's front-month contract data. A settle near $96.20 would be a fourth straight gain and the highest close since May 21.
Now the ladder. Kalshi's contract on a 2026 settle above $115 asked 29.4 cents at 9 p.m. Tuesday, when we last priced this board, with the front month at $94.60 in the evening session per Yahoo Finance. Wednesday at 11 a.m., with oil $1.60 higher and the five tankers on every front page, it asks 29.5, on a bid that slipped to 27.7. On the morning of September 2, with the front month at $90.95 in the overnight session, the same contract asked 32. Three escalations in seven days, each bigger than the last, have taken oil from $90.95 to $96.20 and taken the first rung from 32 cents to 29.5. That is the fact this page is built on. The crowd has decided that the tanker war is a September story, and it has priced it on the September board, where the contract on a settle above $100 this month bid 28 cents Tuesday night and 39 on Wednesday morning. The year board did not get the memo. Eight AI models re-read the record Wednesday morning without seeing a single Kalshi quote, and they moved the other way: seven of the eight now call this week a physical loss of barrels rather than a risk premium on barrels still flowing, up from two on Tuesday night, and their average on the first rung went from 35% to 40%, ten points above the ask. The full board is below, after the record that explains why the two sides parted.
What The Tanker WAR Changed
Two numbers frame this morning, and they disagree with each other. Macquarie's analysts put oil transit through the Strait of Hormuz at roughly 7 million barrels a day, down from about 20 million before the conflict, Bloomberg reported on Monday. On Sunday, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright had said "on average, 9 million barrels of oil a day are getting through the strait," which he called "probably two-thirds or more of preconflict flows." Both figures count barrels rather than ships, and the ship count is worse: four vessels transited on Saturday and six on Sunday, per NBC News. Macquarie's number says two-thirds of the strait's oil is gone, measured against 20 million a day before the war. Wright's number says two-thirds of normal is still getting through. Same strait, opposite reading, and the ladder pays only on a settle above $115, so the whole board is a bet on which of those two numbers is real.
The record since this page last went out runs in dated steps. On Saturday, September 5, CENTCOM said it had destroyed three Iranian tankers after the Revolutionary Guard tried to hit US warships with missiles. On Tuesday, the count went to eight. CENTCOM named the five: the M/T Kaviz, Charminar, Horizon 1 and Riesco in the Gulf of Oman, and the M/T Derya near Kharg Island. "American forces directed the crews to abandon ship before the vessels were struck and rendered inoperable," the command said, and of the warship Iran had targeted: "The U.S. warship successfully evaded the attempted Iranian attacks and continued to patrol." No American personnel were harmed. The first reports reached the wires in the late afternoon and CENTCOM's confirmation came at 6:33 p.m. Eastern, per CBS News. Iran's answer came about three and a half hours later. Beyond the missiles at Jordan, the Revolutionary Guard claimed hits on "two American vessels and 8 tankers in the region," a claim a US official called ineffective, per NBC. The Treasury had spent the afternoon sanctioning 36 more entities and Iran's remaining airlines, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi answered that on social media: "After 47 years of sanctions, the US went to war with Iran... More sanctions. Seriously?"
The two Saudi facts from Tuesday's edition still stand, and neither has a number attached. Yemen's Houthis, allied with Iran, fired what they called "dozens" of ballistic missiles and drones at four Aramco sites in Saudi Arabia's south and on its Red Sea coast on Tuesday, wounding at least 73 civilians and setting fires at several energy sites, including the 400,000-barrel-a-day Jazan refinery on the Red Sea coast, which mostly serves the domestic market. Saudi Arabia's Energy Ministry confirmed "the temporary suspension of some operational activities," and The War Zone cited NASA thermal data showing fires around Jazan. With Hormuz constrained, the Kingdom has been pushing millions of barrels a day through its East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea, the route the Houthis sit on. Nobody has published what Tuesday cost in barrels, and Riyadh has not yet answered the strikes, though a source told CNN it plans to.
The one piece of the record pulling the other way is a deal. Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said Monday that an agreement with Oman on a temporary shipping corridor through the strait is in its final stages and days away, to be documented with the UN's International Maritime Organization, and that "the talks have made very good progress," Bloomberg reported. Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi announced the framework on August 26, per Al Jazeera. It is a route about seven miles wide that enters through Iranian waters, subjects ships to Iranian inspection and permission, and shares transit revenue between Iran and Oman. Washington wants the waterway free of formal Iranian-Omani control or fees, and Tehran says the strait otherwise stays closed until "the US must fulfil its commitments under the June MoU, including granting sanctions relief." The banks have written both endings, all per NBC. Goldman Sachs said Brent "might exceed $120" if Gulf flows stay this low, and its base case is the most bearish number in the record: $80 WTI in December 2026, with Gulf output only 0.5 million barrels a day below pre-war levels in 2027. HSBC sees "around $120" if diplomacy fails, and about $95 through year-end if it holds. Bank of America's Francisco Blanch sees $95 to $120 while the skirmishes continue, and up to $150 for major infrastructure damage.
Kalshi carries three boards on WTI's price, and the tape on each one since Tuesday afternoon is the market's reading of that record. The quotes below were fetched from Kalshi at about 11 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, September 9, and the prior prints are from the exchange's own hourly candles.
- Wednesday's Settle (The Daily Contract). With the front month near $96.20, a close above $95.99 was bid 56 and offered 57; above $96.49 at 39 to 41; above $96.99 at 21 to 24; above $97.99 at 5 to 7.
- September's High (The Month Board). The $100.01-or-above rung bid 39 cents under a 48-cent ask, with the last trade at 38. Tuesday night it was a 28-cent bid under a 56-cent ask. The bid is the number to watch there, because a bid is money that has to be right, and it rose 11 cents overnight on the thinnest of the three boards, about 4,200 contracts open. This is the rung the tanker war repriced.
- The 2026 High (The Year Board). The $115.01-or-above rung had a night that reads better as a table than a sentence, so here it is, in Eastern time, from the hourly candles.
| When | $115+ rung | The tape |
|---|---|---|
| Tue Sept 8, 3 To 4 P.m. | 28.7 / 28.8¢ book | The last book before the first tanker report; about 240 contracts |
| Tue Sept 8, 4 To 5 P.m. | 26.5 to 30.6¢ | First reports of the tanker strikes; about 1,400 contracts |
| Tue Sept 8, 5 To 6 P.m. | 29.7¢ | The board's heaviest hour was seven rungs up, at the far end of the ladder: 13,552 contracts crossed at $160 or above, all at 8 cents, and the price did not move |
| Tue Sept 8, 6 To 7 P.m. | 30.2¢ close | CENTCOM confirms the five tankers at 6:33; about 2,400 contracts |
| Tue Sept 8, 9 P.m. | 29.2 / 29.4¢ | The quote this page carried Tuesday night (the book, not a candle), WTI $94.60 |
| Tue Sept 8, 9 To 10 P.m. | 29.5 open, 27.3 close | The hour before Iran's missiles at Al-Azraq; about 40 contracts |
| Tue Sept 8, 10 To 11 P.m. | 29.6¢ close | After the missiles, on six contracts |
| Wed Sept 9, 4 A.m. | 29.1¢ on about 450 contracts | Brent through $100 in the overnight session |
| Wed Sept 9, 5 To 9 A.m. | 27.9 to 28.1¢, bids 27.0 to 27.9 | WTI opens at $94.31 and climbs |
| Wed Sept 9, 9 To 10 A.m. | 25.4 low, 29.6 close | WTI through $96; about 800 contracts |
| Wed Sept 9, 10 To 11 A.m. | 28.2 low, 28.8 close, 27.7 / 29.5 book at 11 | WTI $96.20; about 1,650 contracts |
Tuesday put about 11,900 contracts through that one rung, Wednesday about 3,300 by 11 a.m., and the ask at the end of it is seven-tenths of a cent above the 4 p.m. book, before the first tanker burned, and below the 30.2 it printed on the confirmation. One more baseline belongs here, because it is the exchange's own. Kalshi's previous close on the first rung was 26.5 bid and 28.1 ask, so against that mark the rung is up about a cent and a half, and seven of the ten rungs sit above their previous close this morning; only $135, $160 and $180 sit below it. The honest description of the night is not that the rung never moved. It spiked to 30.2 on the confirmation and gave the spike back by morning, and it sits 2.5 cents below where it was a week ago at a lower oil price.
The rest of the ladder moved less than the first rung did, and mostly down. Against Tuesday night's quotes, $120 or above went from a 26-cent ask to 24, $125 from 23 to 22, and $130 from 21 to 19.3, on a bid that eased from 17.8 to 17.4. The only rung that got more expensive was $135 or above, which went from 12.5 bid and 12.6 ask to 13.2 and 13.8; about 1,200 contracts crossed there at 12.5 in the 7 a.m. hour and 500 more at 13.7 just before 11. Above it, $140 sat at 11.8 bid and 12.0 ask, $150 at 9.3 and 9.9, and $180 at 7.4 and 8.6, none of them more than half a cent from Tuesday night. The $160 rung is the one to sit with. It absorbed about 15,400 contracts on Tuesday, more than the first rung did, and 3,000 more on Wednesday, and it moved from a 7.9-bid, 8.0-ask market to 7.8 and 7.9. Somebody sold a great deal of catastrophe at 8 cents on the night the tanker war doubled, and the buyers did not push the price.
Put the three boards side by side and the night reads clearly. The daily board repriced the level: oil is $3.17 higher and Wednesday's ladder says so. The month board repriced September: a $100 settle before the 30th went from a 28-cent bid to 39. The year board gave the spike back: the first rung is within a cent of every pre-strike mark, the next three rungs are cheaper than Tuesday night, and the tail absorbed its heaviest volume of the week without moving. When the level rises and the near board rises with it while the year-high odds stay flat, the crowd is telling you it expects a spike, not a new range. The premium reading this page has carried since September 2 is still the crowd's reading, and Tuesday night, the biggest single escalation of the month, bought back nothing on the first rung at all.
The 2026 Oil High Kalshi Is Measuring Against
Kalshi's year contract does not care where oil finishes December. It pays on the maximum of WTI's daily settlement prices, the end-of-day price ICE reports, over the whole window. One qualifying settle on any trading day decides it for good, and an intraday spike that fades by the close counts for nothing.
Consider March 9. WTI traded as high as $119.48 that day and settled at $94.77, per Yahoo Finance's daily history for the front-month contract. Had Kalshi's rung paid on the touch, the $115 contract would have paid out in March. It pays on the settle, so it did not, and it is still open. The distinction is the whole contract.
Here is the 2026 record the panel was handed. The war between the US and Israel on one side and Iran on the other began February 28, and in the first full week of March WTI rose 35% to $90.90, the largest weekly gain since the contract began trading in 1983, per the Wikipedia chronology of the 2026 oil market. The water tells the same story as the price: the IMF's PortWatch logged six Hormuz transit calls on August 30 against a pre-crisis norm of about 85 a day. On March 14 the US struck military targets on Kharg Island, Al Jazeera reported, the same island the Derya was sitting off when it was struck this week. The year's highest close came on April 7, at $112.95, with an intraday high of $117.63 the same day. A ceasefire announcement around April 8 sent WTI down more than 16% to a $94.41 close in a single session.
What the forecast sites ranking for this query leave out is that the year then failed at the first rung a second time. WTI settled back above $100 on May 12, ran to $105.42 on May 15 and $108.66 on May 18, and was back at $98.26 two sessions later. That May close is the highest of the year outside the April run, and it came without a new invasion or a new strait closure, from the same war doing the same thing again. All told, WTI closed above $100 in 17 sessions this year and above $110 in three, and never at or above $115.01. Then it went the other way: the front month settled at $68.55 on July 6, its lowest close since the war began, two days before the US resumed strikes on Iran following attacks on three commercial vessels in the strait, per Al Jazeera. From that low to Wednesday morning is a climb of about 40%; from the August 26 close of $82.23 it is 17%.
So the first rung on the ladder asks for a settle 1.8% above what this same war already produced in April, and 5.8% above what it produced again in May. From where the front month traded Wednesday morning, it asks for a rally of just under 20%. All three sentences are true, and the whole disagreement below is about which one you believe.
History since 2000 gives the crowd two precedents. Only two calendar years produced a daily close above $115: 2008, which peaked at $145.29 on July 3 on a demand boom and a weak dollar with no physical supply loss, and 2022, which peaked at $123.70 on March 8, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine put real exported barrels in doubt. Measured another way, starting from any daily close since 2000, WTI went on to close at least 19.9% higher within the next 79 sessions in about 28.2% of windows. Restrict the sample to windows that began with 21-session realized volatility above 40% annualized and the frequency climbs to about 43.4%. Realized volatility over the last 21 sessions is about 32.6% now, below that line. The panel got both numbers, the reasons behind the two precedents, and an instruction to say which precedent's cause is present now.
How The Kalshi Oil Ladder Pays
The rule text on the first rung reads: "If ICE reports that the maximum price of oil (as defined exclusively by the set of WTI front-month settle prices) is above $115 between Issuance and Dec 31, 2026, then the market resolves to Yes." Every rung above it is the same sentence with a bigger number, prices are in cents and read as the crowd's probability, and a maximum market can only trigger once. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange, 18+, and availability varies by state as of September 2026.
Which rungs are real markets is the useful question. The $115 rung is a two-sided book with about 571,700 contracts open, the largest on the board; about 3.18 million contracts are open across the ten rungs on 7.87 million traded since the board opened, and the two busiest rungs after the first, by contracts traded, are $150 and $180, not $120. The top of the board is thinner and the spreads say so: $180 or above sits 1.2 cents wide and $200 or above a full cent, so anyone trading the tail is paying a round trip that eats a meaningful slice of the position. Those two widest books still produce the one plainly odd print on the board: $160 or above asks 7.9 cents and $180 or above asks 8.6, so the strictly more likely outcome is offered cheaper than its subset. The gap was 1.1 cents Tuesday night and is 0.7 this morning, and it exists because nobody is quoting either row tightly. Until a rung pays, its price should grind lower as the window shrinks, then gap on any supply headline, which makes this one of the twitchier boards Kalshi runs. Wednesday's settle is still pending, and 79 trading sessions remain after it through December 31. If you are new to how these commodity ladders are built, our guide to Kalshi's commodity markets walks through the daily, monthly and yearly boards and how each settles, and the Strait of Hormuz reopening board is the market that prices the ship count behind all of this.
The Ladder: Kalshi Vs Eight AI Models
Each model received the fetched settle history, the 2026 record including the May run, the verbatim settlement rules, the base rates above with the causes behind the 2008 and 2022 exceptions, and the dated news record through Wednesday morning, including the Macquarie and Wright flow figures side by side, and no market prices. Each produced one distribution across all ten thresholds in a single pass, so every column is internally consistent: the probability of $130 or above can never exceed the probability of $120 or above. The AI blend is the equal-weight mean of the eight seats. Kalshi quotes are as of September 9, 2026, at about 11 a.m. Eastern, and were moving as this was written; the September 8 column is the quote on this page at 9 p.m. Tuesday.
| Threshold | Kalshi bid / ask (Sept 9, 11 a.m. ET) | Kalshi bid / ask (Sept 8, 9 p.m. ET) | AI blend (Sept 9) | AI blend (Sept 8) | ChatGPT (GPT-5.5) | Claude Fable | Claude Opus | Claude Sonnet | Gemini 3.1 Pro | GLM 5.2 | Kimi K3 | DeepSeek V4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $115+ | 27.7 / 29.5¢ | 29.2 / 29.4¢ | 40% | 35% | 44% | 34% | 35% | 33% | 45% | 38% | 45% | 45% |
| $120+ | 23.7 / 24¢ | 24.7 / 26¢ | 28% | 25% | 32% | 26% | 25% | 24% | 32% | 24% | 33% | 30% |
| $125+ | 20.1 / 22¢ | 22.1 / 23¢ | 20% | 18% | 23% | 20% | 18.5% | 17% | 22% | 15% | 25% | 20% |
| $130+ | 17.4 / 19.3¢ | 17.8 / 21¢ | 14.4% | 13% | 17% | 15% | 14% | 13% | 15% | 9% | 18% | 14% |
| $135+ | 13.2 / 13.8¢ | 12.5 / 12.6¢ | 10.2% | 9.1% | 12% | 12% | 10.5% | 10% | 9% | 5.5% | 13% | 10% |
| $140+ | 11.8 / 12¢ | 11.8 / 12.4¢ | 7.3% | 6.6% | 8.5% | 9% | 8% | 7.5% | 5% | 3.5% | 10% | 7% |
| $150+ | 9.3 / 9.9¢ | 9.3 / 10¢ | 4.3% | 3.9% | 5% | 5.5% | 4.8% | 4% | 3% | 2% | 6% | 4% |
| $160+ | 7.8 / 7.9¢ | 7.9 / 8¢ | 2.3% | 2.2% | 2.8% | 3.2% | 3% | 2.2% | 1% | 1% | 3.5% | 2% |
| $180+ | 7.4 / 8.6¢ | 7.3 / 9.1¢ | 0.9% | 0.9% | 0.9% | 1.2% | 1.3% | 0.6% | 0.5% | 0.4% | 1.2% | 1% |
| $200+ | 6.5 / 7.5¢ | 6.5 / 7.8¢ | 0.3% | 0.4% | 0.3% | 0.4% | 0.6% | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.5% | 0.5% |
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: GPT 86% on 9,365 graded calls · Claude Fable 90% on 2,542 graded calls · Claude Opus 89% on 2,681 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 88% on 2,658 graded calls · Gemini 87% on 8,145 graded calls · GLM 84% on 3,747 graded calls · Kimi 87% on 4,074 graded calls · DeepSeek 84% on 3,850 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
More live boards from the same panel: gas prices in 2026, where the $5.00-or-above rung asks 30¢ · a Fed emergency meeting before 2027 · the full graded scoreboard behind every seat above.
Read the first row against its own history before you read it against the crowd. On $115 or above, the eight seats averaged 34% on September 2 from $90.95, 35% Tuesday night from $94.60, and 40% Wednesday morning from $95.95, the level in the models' data card. Across the week oil closed about a fifth of the distance to the payout, the panel moved six points toward it, and the market moved two and a half cents away from it. The gap between the two, two points on September 2 and six on Tuesday, is ten this morning, with the panel on top for the third edition running; in late July the crowd paid 45 cents against a panel at 28. The next row down is the crowd's most confident: $120 or above asks 24 cents on a 23.7 bid, three-tenths wide, and the panel puts it at 28%, so the crowd charges 5.5 cents less for the second rung than the first while the models take off 12 points. Then the two sides swap. On $160 or above, the rung that absorbed 15,400 contracts at 8 cents on Tuesday, the panel averages 2.3% and no seat is above 3.5%. On $180 or above, the crowd asks 8.6 cents and the panel averages 0.9%. The market is paying real money for a scenario the models cannot find in the record, and the models are asking for a first rung the market will not pay for. Both cannot be right about the shape of that distribution, and the scoreboard will say which.
Model estimates generated September 9, 2026, at 14:56 UTC (the three Claude seats answered the same card at 15:26 UTC after a seat cooldown), price-blind. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Models are frequently wrong; the market price reflects real traders' money. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange; 18+, availability varies by state.
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Where The Panel Splits
Tuesday night, six of the eight seats called this week a risk premium on barrels that were still flowing. Wednesday morning, seven of eight call it a physical loss of barrels. Five seats flipped their reading overnight, ChatGPT, Gemini, Kimi, Sonnet and Fable, and the board was moved by three of them plus GLM, which had already called the regime physical on Tuesday and raised its number anyway. Kimi went from 30% on the first rung to 45%, Gemini from 35% to 45%, ChatGPT from 36% to 44%, and GLM from 32% to 38%. DeepSeek, the seat that led Tuesday at 45%, held there and now shares the top with two others. The new reading is the same in each seat's own words. Kimi sees "an actual, widening physical loss of Gulf barrels" and contrasts it with "the fear-only spikes that faded twice this year." Gemini says the tanker strikes and the Saudi fires "have converted geopolitical fear into actual physical supply constraints at the Hormuz chokepoint." ChatGPT puts the brake and the driver in one sentence: "Hormuz throughput impairment is now a real barrel-flow constraint, not just fear, but policy buffers and demand destruction cap the far tail."
Here is the honest part of that move. Tuesday night's record carried one flow figure, Wright's 9 million barrels a day. Wednesday's carried two, because Macquarie's 7 million reached the record on Monday, and three of the four seats that jumped quoted the 7-to-9 range that Macquarie's figure opened, while Gemini quoted the same thing as a loss, 11 to 13 million barrels a day gone. So the panel did not only see five more tankers; it saw a strait losing two-thirds of its oil instead of a third, and it priced that. That is the same argument the crowd is having on the month board, and the panel took the 7 million side of it. The three Claude seats saw the same figure and did not chase it. Claude Fable, the second-highest seat on Tuesday at 38%, came down to 34% while moving its reading to physical, because "this identical war twice stalled below $113 settles this year" and the corridor deal is "days away." Claude Sonnet made the same flip and held its number at 33% anyway, naming those corridor talks as the thing that "would most cut this estimate." Claude Opus, at 35%, is the one seat still calling it a premium, and its argument is the sharpest on the board: "Hormuz flows are already halved yet WTI sits near $96, so $115 needs a new loss of Saudi bypass barrels, not more of the same." If two-thirds of the strait's oil is gone and the front month is $96, then the barrels are being covered, by stocks, by the East-West pipeline, by whatever leaves the Gulf another way, and the route to $115 runs through that pipeline, not through another tanker. The three lowest numbers on the board sit within two points of each other, and they are the three that leaned hardest on how little the price has actually moved.
The seats agree about the top of the ladder more than the bottom, as they did Tuesday, and the top moved less than the bottom did. Asked for the highest settle they would expect in the worst one-in-twenty version of the rest of 2026, the eight answered between $142 and $155; Tuesday the range was $138 to $151. GLM raised its worst case by $17 while raising its first-rung number six points, Kimi and DeepSeek each added about $10, ChatGPT added $2, and the three Claude seats and Gemini moved theirs by $4 or less, three of them down. Not one seat put that number above $155, which is the whole explanation for the tail rows: a bad case that tops out near $150 makes $160 or above at 7.9 cents and $200 or above at 7.5 prices for a different world than the one any seat is modeling. Opus's version of the brakes could stand for all eight: spare capacity inside the Gulf is "nearly worthless" while the strait is shut, reserve releases are "a weeks-long brake, not a cap," and a confirmed multi-day outage at Yanbu or Ras Tanura "would roughly double every rung." Every seat's tail lives or dies on that pipeline.
The row I keep coming back to is still $130, and this week it did something new. The crowd's ask fell from 21 cents Tuesday night to 19.3 and the bid eased to 17.4, while the panel went from 13% to 14.4%. That puts the two within five points of each other for the first time this month, with GLM at 9% sitting below the bid and Kimi at 18% inside the spread. The crowd sold that rung while the tankers burned, and the models bought it, and they met in the middle. On the first rung they are ten points apart and moving away from each other. The difference between those two rows is the difference between "does this war produce a settle above $115" and "does it produce one above $130," and the market's answer, cheaper on the first and steady on the second, says it sees the tanker war as a thing that might add $5 to the year's high, not $20.
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What Moves This Board Next
Three things would move every number on this page, and the seats named all of them, with different weight. A Saudi barrel number comes first: seven of the eight put a confirmed, sustained loss of export capacity at the top of the list of what would most change their estimate, and they named the facilities. Gemini named the Yanbu terminals and the East-West pipeline, Fable named Abqaiq and the same pipeline, Kimi named Kharg Island and Abqaiq, GLM put a figure on it, "Saudi output loss exceeding 1 million b/d," and ChatGPT's version, "confirmed sustained damage or closure preventing Saudi/UAE/Kuwaiti exports from bypassing Hormuz," is the bull case in one clause. Opus said a multi-day outage at Yanbu or Ras Tanura would double every rung. Sonnet, the eighth seat, put the corridor there instead. Nobody has published that barrel number since Tuesday's fires, and Riyadh, which a source told CNN plans to retaliate, has not yet answered them. The corridor comes second, and it cuts the other way. Five seats named the Iran-Oman deal as the thing they are most uncertain about, and Sonnet and Kimi each said a signed corridor would most cut their numbers. Baghaei's "days away" is a live clock, and Washington's objection to Iranian-Omani fees is the friction on it. A deal that reopens the strait runs the April tape in reverse, and April's tape was a 16% drop in a session. The near board is the third tell, and the fastest. The September month board prices a settle above $100 before the 30th at 39 bid and 48 ask; a print there would cut the first rung's remaining distance from just under 20% to 15%, and the daily board, at 56 cents for a Wednesday close above $95.99, says the level is holding into the afternoon.
The same shock runs through two other boards this panel prices. The gas price board marks a $5.00-or-above national average at 30 cents this morning, and the Fed's rate path is where a $130 crude print would land next. Prices on this page refresh during the news wave; re-run the payout arithmetic at the price you are actually offered, because the 29.5-cent ask quoted here was moving while this was written.
Zoom back out and the ladder reads simply. The year has already shown twice what this war does to WTI: a $112.95 settle in April, about $2 short of the first payout, and a $108.66 settle in May, each erased within days. Tuesday night was the biggest escalation of the month, and the first rung asks seven-tenths of a cent more this morning than it did at 4 p.m. Tuesday, before the first tanker report, and less than it printed on CENTCOM's confirmation, at a higher oil price, which is the crowd saying the third run ends like the first two. Eight models handed the same record, plus one lower flow number, moved five points the other way, and seven of them now call the barrels lost rather than delayed. The tail is priced as a catastrophe the models cannot find: the heaviest hour on the board crossed at $160 for 8 cents against a 2.3% blend, and $180 asks 8.6 against 0.9%. A buyer of those rows needs barrels physically leaving the market for weeks, on both routes at once. Tuesday burned five ships and put Brent through $100. The Saudi barrel count is still the number nobody has published, and the year board's price says the crowd is waiting for it.
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Hero illustration: OddsShopper, in the house collage style. Strait of Hormuz photo by MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC, licensed Public domain; photos cropped, toned, and composited.
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