Set against that is a trading pattern that has now repeated often enough to have its own shape. Just five days before the August 31 strike, Saxo Bank's Ole Hansen was describing a rapid unwind of the war premium, with Brent sliding from above $95 toward $86 on reports that Iran and Oman were negotiating a temporary maritime corridor and mine-clearing effort through the Strait. Hansen's own framing was blunt: prices were falling not because disrupted oil had actually returned to the market, but because traders were betting it would soon.
What makes that call for skepticism credible is what happened next. Physical flows barely budged even as prices dropped. Preliminary Kpler data showed just five vessels crossing the Strait on August 25, against a ten-day average of fifteen and a pre-war norm near 100. Ole Hvalbye at ABG Sundal Collier described the pattern as one that's held all summer: price rallies whenever Hormuz talks stall, then sells off whenever they progress, regardless of whether an actual functioning shipping corridor exists yet. Add a surprise 4.2-million-barrel U.S. crude inventory build reported the same week, more than seven times what forecasters expected, and you have a market primed to sell off on any excuse, war premium or not.