Splitting the difference is tempting, but the data doesn't support a clean split. The physical floor is real. A market that has burned through 400 million barrels of inventory and its own spare capacity cushion isn't going back to pre-war prices in the mid-$60s regardless of how many ceasefire headlines cross the wire. That part of the structuralist case is hard to argue with.
But the specific August 31 spike looks more like this year's pattern than a new regime. It was an exchange of missiles at military installations, not a strike that took export infrastructure offline the way the March attacks on Ras Tanura and South Pars did. Absent actual damage to production or export capacity, this kind of headline event has reversed within days almost every time it's happened since February. Expect a floor near current levels to hold. Expect this particular spike to give back most of its gains within one or two weeks unless the next strike hits something that actually stops oil from moving.
What separates noise from signal going forward isn't the next Trump statement or Iranian warning. It's whether Kpler and PortWatch vessel-transit counts through the Strait start moving off their current near-zero base, whether the Iran-Oman corridor talks produce an actual functioning route rather than another round of talks, and whether China's crude imports show any sign of recovering from their multi-million-barrel shortfall. Watch those three numbers. They'll tell you which camp is right long before the next headline does.
