The last four official closes alternated in direction, each moving at least 2.9 percent, while the same number of ships went through Hormuz as the week before.
Brent has stopped having a view on the Strait of Hormuz. Its last four official closes moved +2.95, -4.06, +3.41 and -5.01 percent: up, down, up, down, the smallest of the four sitting at the 84th percentile of pre-crisis daily moves and the largest at the 95th. In the 9,097 Brent closes this site holds, back to May 1987, four consecutive sessions that each moved at least 2.9 percent, in alternating directions, have happened six times. Four of the six are November 2001, November 2008, April 2020 and March 2021. The fifth is 18-24 March, this crisis's opening month. The sixth ended on Tuesday.
The arithmetic is the finding. Five sessions ago Brent closed at 114.89, where the September slide this site measured on 24 September had stopped. It has since travelled 17.7 percentage points of daily movement to close at 113.96 - eighty-one hundredths of a percent lower. The slide neither continued nor reversed; it stopped being a direction. A market that moves five percent and then unmoves it is not revising a forecast, it is holding two of them.
Nothing underneath the price changed while it did that. This site's transit count puts 22 vessels and 0.36 million tonnes of capacity through Hormuz in 21-27 September, against 22 vessels and 0.39 Mt the week before - the identical ship count, on a waterway that ran about 83 vessels a day before the crisis and 58.5 a day in January. The traffic halved in the week the price broke and has been flat through the fortnight the price has spent thrashing.
Tuesday's 5.01 percent fall priced a full day of Iranian claims, every item of it timed before the London assessment and therefore inside that close: the IRGC spokesman saying US warships had pulled 500 kilometres back from the strait, the army spokesman saying Iranian order prevails in it, the foreign minister restating the conditions, and Mehr reporting a vessel struck by a suspected projectile. Which of those the sellers were answering is not recoverable from this data, and this site's own test says not to try: days carrying Iranian state-media statements move the next close 0.88 times as much as quiet days, at a permutation p of 0.72. That is a null result, not a channel.
What changes is that the oil price has stopped being usable as evidence, in the fortnight both capitals reached for it. Tehran spent 27 and 28 September answering American denials of Iranian control by pointing at crude, and Tasnim's Oil Prices Rebound As Trump Rejects Truce Proposal was right about the session it was written in - the next one took back more than the rebound and left Brent below where the slide had ended. Trump's post at 21:00 UTC on Tuesday, that Iran has lost control of the strait, landed after that close, and the three sessions since are not published. In a tape that reverses every day both sides can go on finding a close that proves them right, which is the same as neither of them having one.
The single precedent is worth naming and not acting on. March's episode ran into reported Hormuz transit tolls of up to two million dollars a ship, then a 48-hour ultimatum, then the crisis's first ceasefire nine sessions after the last reversal; Tehran said on 30 September it had received a US proposal. That is a sample of one. The narrower takeaway is the usable one: Brent's direction has stopped carrying information about Hormuz, so price the next headline for size and keep reading the ship count for sign.
† Corrected 5 October: the dek and first paragraph said each of the four closes reversed the one before, but 24 September's rise followed a rise: the run alternates, with three reversals. The largest move is the 95th percentile, not the 96th. Brent is official EIA closes from timeline.json, ending 113.96 on 29 September. Percentiles rank the 8,929 absolute daily moves before 1 February 2026. Episodes merge windows of four closes each moving 2.9 percent or more, alternating in sign; at 3 percent this run drops out. State-media ratio and p: words_deeds.json, adjusted p 1.0.
Data series · 2026-09-29 Brent official closes: +2.95, -4.06, +3.41 and -5.01 percent on 24, 25, 28 and 29 September, ending at 113.96
Data series · 2026-09-27 Hormuz transit count: 22 vessels and 0.36 Mt in 21-27 September, against 22 vessels and 0.39 Mt the week before
Iranian statement · 2026-09-29 IRGC spokesman says US warships have retreated 500km from the Strait of Hormuz source
Iranian statement · 2026-09-29 Army spokesman says Iranian order prevails in the Strait of Hormuz source
Iranian statement · 2026-09-29 Mehr: a vessel was struck by a suspected projectile in the Strait of Hormuz source
Iranian statement · 2026-09-28 Tasnim: oil prices rebound as Trump rejects a truce proposal source
Truth Social · 2026-09-29 Trump shares a post headlined Iran Has Lost Control of the Strait at 21:00 UTC, after the close source
Iranian statement · 2026-09-30 Iranian government spokeswoman says Iran has received a US proposal source
Computed, not asserted — every number here is derived from public data: official EIA Brent closes via FRED, IMF PortWatch transit counts, Polymarket and Kalshi odds, and source-linked curated events. Method and caveats · Atom feed · llms.txt
https://chokepointdata.com/analysis/2026-10-03-four-closes-four-reversals/