West Texas Intermediate crude rose 4.26% to $74.45 a barrel on CME Group's July 12, 2026 update, a $3.04 daily gain that ranks among the sharpest single-day moves since 2020 CME Group. Brent's Last Day Financial contract climbed a similar 3.96%, or $2.83, to settle at $74.24 CME Group. By the following session, MarketWatch had the WTI front-month contract trading at $78.13, having ranged between $73.69 and $78.45 against a prior close of $72.61 MarketWatch.

The rally marks a sharp reversal from where the market stood less than two weeks earlier. Brent futures had settled below $72 a barrel on July 1, 2026 — the lowest settlement since the week before the Iran war began on February 28, 2026 Bloomberg. That five-month stretch had seen crude give back most of its war-premium gains: WTI settled above $73 on June 22 with Brent around $77, both down roughly 1% that day Bloomberg.

Physical benchmarks tell a story of steady normalization through June even as futures whipsawed. The EIA's June average for Brent spot came in at $85 a barrel, down $22 from May and down $32 from the recent April peak EIA. Europe's Brent spot FOB price for the week of July 6–10 was assessed at $69.56 EIA — a level that makes the subsequent futures surge look less like a continuation of the post-strike premium and more like a fresh repricing event.

That repricing is what the WSJ's framing gets at: traders are betting the Strait of Hormuz won't return to pre-war transit norms. The structural evidence for that view sits in the term structure and spread history from the conflict's early days. The Brent-WTI spread peaked at $25 a barrel on March 31, 2026, and averaged $11 across March after starting the quarter near $4 EIA. Weeks later, in early April, Brent's spot price spiked to a premium of more than $25 over the front-month Brent futures contract itself — a backwardation extreme reflecting acute concern over prompt physical availability rather than longer-dated supply EIA.

Barchart's numbers complicate the picture on timing. The August 2026 WTI contract (CLQ26) on NYMEX closed down $0.67, or 0.93%, on the Friday of that week, before the sharp Sunday-into-Monday gap higher captured in the CME figures Barchart. Read together with the divergence between CME's July 12 print and MarketWatch's subsequent $78.13 quote, the sequence looks like a market that sold off into the weekend, then reopened with a violent gap — the kind of move futures desks associate with a genuine reassessment of geopolitical risk rather than routine positioning flow.

What's driving that reassessment isn't fully specified in the data, but the shape of the move is instructive. A near-4% single-session gain of this magnitude, arriving after a month of steady spot-price decay from $85 toward the $69–70 range, doesn't fit a narrative of gradually easing tensions. It fits one where a specific event or signal reset expectations about transit risk through the Strait — the corridor through which a substantial share of global seaborne crude and LNG moves, and the same chokepoint whose earlier disruption fears drove March's blowout in the Brent-WTI spread and April's extraordinary Brent backwardation.

For desks running term structure and calendar spreads, the relevant question now is whether backwardation reasserts itself the way it did in Q1, or whether the curve stays comparatively flat given that the physical benchmarks had already normalized considerably by July. The EIA's June STEO figures showing Brent averaging $85 in May and falling toward $69–70 by early July suggest the market had priced substantial de-escalation before this latest jump. A reversal of that scale, this fast, tends to compress risk premia back into prompt contracts first, which is consistent with WTI's slightly larger percentage gain relative to Brent in the CME print.

None of the sourced data confirms a specific new strike, blockade, or policy announcement behind the move — the available reporting frames it as a market bet on durability of disruption rather than a documented event. That distinction matters for anyone marking books against this print: a repricing driven by expectation of prolonged Strait disruption behaves differently in the options surface than one driven by a single confirmed supply loss, particularly around skew and term premium in Brent/WTI relative value trades.