Brent crude closed the week up 7.84% at $109.26. WTI gained 10.48% to $105.42. [1] Those are the largest weekly oil moves of the Iran war. Hormuz traffic ran at 10 to 30 vessels per day this week against a pre-war 140. [2] The paper's Friday brief on Brent's tape and the IEA's October date named the two clocks. Saturday's seven-day frame is that the second clock got louder.

The IEA's May Oil Market Report keeps the market in deficit through October even if Hormuz flows resume gradually from June. [3] The Trump-Xi summit produced no enforcement language that survived the week — Iran seized a tanker off Fujairah and sank an Indian-flagged cargo ship near Oman within hours of Trump's departure from Beijing. [2] The futures curve heard both data points and repriced.

The mainstream weekly tape reads as a gain. Business Times Singapore and Gulf News charted the move that way. [1] The energy desk reading is different. A weekly gain of this size on this Hormuz traffic count is not a recovery story. It is the market saying the October date the IEA printed is now the operative one, not the summit communique.

That is the brief. The headline tape is +7.84% Brent and +10.48% WTI. The structural tape is a Hormuz vessel count that has not normalized and an IEA calendar that says October is the earliest balance. The week the second clock got louder.

-- DARA OSEI, London