Is Oil Still Flowing? | Macro Mondays: Monday, June 22, 2026

**Andreas Steno** (0:08)
You ready?
Hey, guys, and welcome back to Macro Monday. I'm Andreas Steno, and I'm flying solo once again today as Mikael is still enjoying that Italian food and wine. We have a great show for you today, and we'll basically answer the question that matters the most for markets right now. Is the oil still flowing despite the hiccups that we've seen in the negotiations between Iran and the US over the weekend? But before we get started, from Connect to Alpha to Pro, we've basically dropped our prices to their lowest levels ever here at Real Vision. The setup is once in a lifetime. That's why we're slashing prices so you don't miss out. You can go to realvision.com/pricing to secure your future today. Of course, to complement all of that, we have our three flagship reports here from Steno Weas research with our portfolio updates and more for the Pro tier each and every week. I can tell you that we are on an absolute role at the moment. It's probably worth every penny if you buy a Pro subscription. At least, I'm a very happy guy today and I'll get back to why I watched the end of this show. Before we get to the micro portfolio ideas, let's have a look at the situation in the Strait of Hormuz. I think it was on Sunday, Iran suddenly told the world media outlets that they were planning on leaving the negotiations due to the hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. As far as we know, live as I'm speaking here, the negotiations are still ongoing. We've actually had pretty decent news flow out of the negotiations today. But it's still unlikely that the situation will improve in a straight line from here. Remember that it's less than a week ago that we got the signing of this memorandum of understanding between the two parties. And yet a few days after that, we suddenly had the Iranian side out saying that they would close the Strait of Hormuz again. So maybe that's a good place to start. Is the Strait of Hormuz actually closed or is it open? Let's have a look at the flow data that we can actually confirm on page 5 So after the signing of the memorandum mid last week, we had a couple of very solid flow days, as you can see from the spike here on the chart of vessels crossings in the Strait of Hormuz. We're still pretty far from normalized levels pre-war, but as far as I can count, and also confirmed by the US administration, we had oil flowing at an extent that was pretty close to pre-war levels during Friday and Saturday. Then on Sunday, we had these hiccups in the negotiations, and only one major oil cargo left the region with Saudi Arabian oil, so maybe three and a half million barrels left the region on Sunday. Today, still no confirmed news about the flow out of the region, but the oil is at least partially flowing, and the Strait is partially open. I think that's the fair assumption as we speak and remember, which is basically a testimony to the thesis that we laid out during April and May, where we lectured right about every oil ponded on earth. There is also a flow that is unaccounted for in this official data. We had a flow out of Abu Dhabi to, among other places, the US during May, for example, and none of it was confirmed in the official data, but we had more oil coming out of the region than what was reported. As I said, through those months, both sides basically had an incentive to keep that as a secret, to ensure that their leverage in the negotiations was kept intact.
Looking at the current development in oil prices and by-products on page 6, a good question to ask right now is obviously, how much of a war premium do we actually have left?
To start with the dated oil market in dark blue here, well, we have, I'd say, around 25 percent worth of a war premium left in the oil prices. We're still above pre-war levels, but not by a lot. As you can see, basically, since early April, it's been one-way traffic lower in the oil price. Subsequently, we've seen a one-way traffic lower in all of the by-products as well. Jet fuel, for example, in red here, the price in Singapore, is almost halved since its peak in early April.
So, by all means, we've basically flipped from a regime where energy prices went up in a straight line to a regime where they're coming down fast, even though we're not fully back to pre-war levels. But actually, in some special cases, we are even back below pre-war levels. Take the example of the Urea in the US Gulf in light blue here, as one of the fertilizer products. We're actually trading below the levels that we saw pre-war, which contrasts the alarmism that we saw from a lot of energy pundits during the first weeks of the war, where everything from a famine to a shortage of fertilizers was discussed. I mean, I simply think that it is safe to say now that we can discard those worries. Having said that, would I short oil here?