WTI crude settled at $74.14 a barrel on July 13, up 3.82% on the session, while Brent added 3.88% to reach $78.96, according to WSJ's live markets coverage. The move follows President Trump's reimposition of a naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, per the same coverage — a reversal that erases roughly six weeks of price action built on the assumption that Hormuz flows were normalizing.

The whiplash is worth tracing in full, because the forward curve has been repricing a binary risk almost weekly since mid-June. On June 19, seven Iranian supertankers departed Chabahar after an earlier blockade lifted, and Bloomberg reported oil surging on the signal that shipments were resuming (Bloomberg). By June 22, roughly 6 million barrels of Iranian crude aboard three US-sanctioned vessels had transited Hormuz, and Bloomberg separately reported more than 30 million barrels departing for Asia in the week before a US waiver took effect (Bloomberg; Bloomberg). Notably, Bloomberg's Hormuz coverage predates WSJ's first related item by six days, a gap that traders relying on a single wire service would have felt directly in position timing.

That flow kept building. On July 1, Bloomberg reported US military support helping push Hormuz throughput above 10 million barrels per day, with American officials framing the volume as eroding Tehran's leverage over the strait (Bloomberg). Brent settled below $72 that same day — its lowest print since the week before the Iran war began, per Bloomberg's oil markets desk (Bloomberg). For a market that had spent weeks pricing in supply normalization, sub-$72 Brent looked like confirmation that the risk premium had drained out.

It didn't hold. Reuters reported oil settling 3% higher on July 7 after Washington revoked a general license tied to Iran sanctions, the first concrete sign that the waiver regime enabling June's tanker traffic was being unwound (Reuters). The following session brought a much sharper move: crude settled nearly 5% higher as the US-Iran truce buckled, with Trump confirming the blockade's reinstatement and announcing a 20% levy on cargo transiting Hormuz, according to Reuters (Reuters). By July 9, Reuters described fresh US strikes against Iran delaying the strait's full reopening (Reuters).

The 20% cargo levy is the detail desks should be pricing carefully. A tariff on transit rather than an outright shipping ban changes the calculus for freight and insurance markets differently than a hard blockade would — it's a friction cost layered onto tanker economics rather than a volume shutoff, assuming enforcement is real rather than nominal. Whether the levy is actually collectible, or functions more as a deterrent headline, matters enormously for how much of the current premium is structural versus transient.

By July 13, the dispute had moved from questions of volume to questions of fact: Bloomberg Businessweek Daily reported that the US and Iran were disputing whether the strait was even open, a disagreement that itself is bullish for volatility regardless of which side is correct (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily). Markets tend to price the cost of uncertainty about a chokepoint status as aggressively as they price a confirmed closure, and the term structure into the August contract (CLQ26, tracked on WSJ's futures data page) reflects that ambiguity as much as any specific flow data.

Settlement mechanics add a wrinkle for anyone marking positions this week. CME Group's crude oil settlements page shows trade dates running from Monday, July 6 through Friday, July 10 (CME Group), meaning the July 13 spike sits just outside that published settlement window and will show up in the next update. Separately, CME's price-limit schedule for Tuesday, July 14 lists a limit of 714.0 for the Crude Oil Bullet Futures contract (ticker WSQ6) (CME Group) — a reminder that exchange-set circuit breakers are being recalibrated in real time as realized volatility in the complex climbs.

What stands out across six weeks of reporting is less the direction of any single move than the frequency of regime flips. Flows opened, then surged past 10 million barrels a day, then reversed within a week on a single sanctions decision. For desks running Hormuz-linked hedges, the practical takeaway isn't a directional call — it's that the reopening premium priced in during late June was never as durable as sub-$72 Brent made it look, and positioning built on any single week's flow data has been getting overrun by the next week's headline with unusual regularity.