Kpler shipping data showed 18 vessels passed through the Bab al-Mandeb on Sunday vs 27 on Saturday

Daily vessel counts through the Bab al-Mandeb have become the standard high-frequency proxy for Red Sea transit risk since the rerouting episode began, with private tanker-tracking data typically leading official confirmations by days. A single-day drop in transits is noisy on its own: counts fluctuate with scheduling and weekend effects, and it is the sustained trend over several sessions that has historically signalled genuine avoidance rather than variance. The transmission channel is freight and insurance first, with war-risk premia and rerouting around the Cape adding voyage time and tightening effective tonnage, which tends to show up in tanker and container rates before it reaches crude or product flat prices. The distinction worth drawing is between ships diverted by operator choice and ships hit or threatened, as the former reverses quickly while the latter has tended to produce stickier risk premia. Follow-ons are the next few days of transit counts, any fresh incident reports or operator suspension announcements, and whether war-risk insurance quotes adjust. Weekend prints of this kind often set the tone for Asian session commodity and shipping desks but are frequently revised in interpretation once the fuller weekly pattern emerges.