Chokepoint Data · the Strait of Hormuz crisis

Closure declarations: regime-dependent, not repetition-dependent

5 declarations; the first and last both ~99th-percentile jumps.

Published 2026-08-11 · analysis

Pattern brokeDeclaring the strait closed for the 5th time moved oil as much as the first — repetition does not dull it. What decides the reaction is the regime the market is already in.

Iran declared the strait closed 5 times. The reaction did not decay with repetition — the 1st (2026-02-28) and the 5th (2026-07-12) declarations both produced ~99th-percentile jumps (+8.3% and +9.8%). But it wasn't uniform either: 2 middle declarations landed inside active peace-deal windows and printed negative — during those stretches Brent was falling on deal optimism, and a re-closure read as confirmation of the collapse already priced in. What the market responds to is the regime it's in, not the count of declarations.

DateBrent next closevs pre-crisis daysBrent +7dConfounds
1st closure declaration2026-02-28+8.3%bigger than 98.6%+34.2%1 †
2nd (re-closure)2026-04-18+4.8%bigger than 94.3%+13.4%2 †
3rd (complete-closure order)2026-06-11-3.0%bigger than 83.5%-17.1%2 †
4th (re-closure)2026-06-20-4.9%bigger than 94.7%-12.8%2 †
5th (re-closure)2026-07-12+9.8%bigger than 98.9%+14.4%3 †

† Attribution caveat: 20 of 26 major events have another major event inside their ±7-day window, so 7-day reactions are not attributable to a single event. Percentiles rank each move's size against 1796 pre-crisis trading days (2019-01-01 to 2026-01-31 — a window that itself contains COVID, Ukraine, and the June 2025 war).

Open this piece in the interactive site (charts, timeline, related events) →

Computed, not asserted — every number here is derived from public data: official EIA Brent closes via FRED, IMF PortWatch transit counts, Polymarket and Kalshi odds, and source-linked curated events. Method and caveats · Atom feed · llms.txt

https://chokepointdata.com/analysis/closure-declarations/