Brent fell 2.14% on Friday on Iran's offer to reopen Hormuz within a week, and the thirty-year…

Friday closed with two prices resting on promises. Iran's foreign minister offered a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days, and Brent fell 2.14% to $104.32. Soybean futures settled at 1,319 cents with the largest speculative long in our positioning record, 265,159 contracts in the week to 22 September, waiting for the trade detail from the Washington summit. By Saturday evening both had answers. President Trump rejected Iran's proposal, and the White House's trade text committed China to at least 10 million tonnes of US coal in 2027 and again in 2028 — with no soybean volume anywhere in it.

The oil answer matters less than what the physical data had already said. The engine's count of tankers departing through Hormuz was 212 on the day of the offer and 211 the next, against a thirty-day mean of 297; through August and the first half of September it rarely went below 300. Departures from the US Gulf Coast ran above their own baseline on both days. Had Friday's price fall reflected supply coming back, the tankers would have moved before the price did. They moved the other way, which is what a physical market does when it expects a closure to last. Yesterday we declined to read the first low reading until it repeated. It repeated.

The soybean answer is a mark on our own call. We wrote yesterday that the record length would prove early rather than wrong if Monday's detail named Chinese soybean volumes and the New Orleans grain count held above its thirty-day mean for a week. The detail arrived early, and named coal. The loadings supplied one strong day — 18 vessels on Saturday against a mean of 11.5 — which is a start and not a week. The $30bn tariff arrangement includes agricultural products and a working group on market access, so the door is open; but a crowd that bought a document now owns a process.

The bond market had already stopped waiting on oil, which is why the refusal changes less there than it seems. The thirty-year rose on Friday while crude fell; it did not need the oil relief and does not lose anything by its withdrawal. The price that did lean on the relief was the front end, where the five-year eased 2 basis points — and Friday's durable-goods report, our 25 September catalyst, gave that rally no support: core capital-goods orders rose 1.6% against 0.5% expected. Meanwhile the Financial Times reports that foreign purchases of US equities reached a record in the year to July as appetite for US debt faded — the other half of the 20 September call that the foreign lender had stepped back from Treasuries. The foreign dollar did not leave; it changed markets.

Two older calls, briefly. The tokenised-bitcoin balance we flagged on 25 September held on Saturday at $351m, with Binance taking a $100m stake in its issuer. And Washington's interest in a stronger yen met a positioning report showing speculators had already cut their yen longs to 72 thousand contracts from 120.4 thousand before the remarks — a lighter crowd for a policy-driven move to run into.

**What would prove this wrong.** Gulf tanker departures back above 280 a day for three sessions without a deal would mean the strait is reopening in practice and Friday's price was early rather than wrong. On the soybean side, an announced Chinese purchase with New Orleans loadings above their mean through 2 October would vindicate the crowd. Conviction is high on the oil read and medium on the soybean half.

**Method.** Tape figures are the settled session of 2026-09-25; no regulated market has traded since the weekend's news. Brent, WTI, copper, natural gas, diesel and soybeans are quoted at exchange settlement on the named contract. Physical series are settled to 2026-09-26 and count departures or loadings identified by vessel tracking, not barrels or tonnes; the Hormuz series recorded a zero on 20 September that we treat as a coverage gap. Positioning is the largest managed-money row per commodity for the week to 2026-09-22.