WTI crude settled at $74.14 a barrel on July 13, up 3.82% for the day, while Brent added 3.88% to reach $78.96, according to WSJ's live markets coverage. President Trump's reinstatement of a naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz—one of the world's most critical oil shipping channels—reversed six weeks of price action built on the assumption that crude flows were normalizing.

To understand why this single policy announcement moved oil so sharply, it helps to trace what the market had been pricing in 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. 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. That reporting gap—Bloomberg's Hormuz coverage ran six days ahead of the WSJ's first related coverage—mattered for traders positioning on the news flow.

Flow kept building through early July. 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. Brent settled below $72 that same day—its lowest print since before the Iran war began. For a market that had spent weeks pricing in supply normalization, sub-$72 Brent looked like the risk premium had dried up.

It reversed course sharply over the next week. 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. Two sessions later, crude settled nearly 5% higher as Trump confirmed the blockade's reinstatement and announced a 20% levy on cargo transiting Hormuz. By July 9, Reuters described fresh US strikes against Iran delaying the strait's full reopening.

The 20% cargo levy deserves close attention from trading desks. A tariff on transit operates differently in freight and insurance markets than an outright shipping ban would. It layers a friction cost onto tanker economics rather than shutting off volume entirely—assuming the levy is enforced seriously rather than floated as a negotiating tactic. Whether the charge is actually collectible matters enormously for determining how much of the current price premium is permanent versus temporary.

By mid-July, the geopolitical dispute had shifted ground. Bloomberg Businessweek reported that the US and Iran were disputing whether the strait was even open—a disagreement that itself inflates volatility regardless of which account is accurate. Markets tend to price uncertainty about a chokepoint's status as aggressively as they price confirmed closure. The term structure into the August contract reflects that ambiguity as much as any specific volume data.

Settlement mechanics warrant a note for anyone managing positions. CME Group's crude oil settlements page shows trade dates running from Monday, July 6 through Friday, July 10, meaning the July 13 spike sits just outside that published window and will appear in the next update. CME's price-limit schedule for Tuesday, July 14 lists a limit of 714.0 for the Crude Oil Bullet Futures contract—a reminder that circuit breakers are being recalibrated in real time as volatility climbs.

What strikes me across six weeks of reporting is less the direction of any single move than the sheer 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 lesson is not a directional view. It's that the reopening premium priced in during late June was never as solid 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 consistency.