[MARKET ANALYSIS] Oil futures gained in the absence of a Strait of Hormuz deal, while Iran issued six demands for the US

Rallies built on the absence of a Hormuz deal rather than an actual supply disruption follow a well-worn pattern: crude prices in a risk premium on negotiation failure, and that premium has historically proven perishable, tending to bleed out over subsequent sessions if no physical flow through the strait is interrupted. The distinction that matters is between headline risk and freight-and-insurance risk; only when tanker rates, war-risk premia or actual loadings through the strait move does the rally acquire fundamental backing. Iran presenting maximalist demands, including withdrawal, reparations and sanctions relief, reads in past negotiating cycles as an opening position rather than a terminal one, and the tell has typically been whether back-channels, often Gulf intermediaries, continue to operate alongside the public posturing. The cross-asset read is the established one: firmer crude feeds the inflation impulse and, as here, tends to weigh on gold when real-yield and safe-haven flows compete, while industrial metals trade on the demand side of the tape and have shrugged off such episodes unless escalation is sustained. The follow-ons worth tracking are any movement in shipping insurance costs and strait traffic, official statements from the mediating parties, and whether the crude curve moves into deeper backwardation at the front, the usual marker of the market pricing physical tightness rather than rhetoric.