[MARKET UPDATE] US equity futures begin rangebound, while oil futures are higher amid the absence of official confirmation for a Iran-Oman deal and with Iran issuing six demands to the US

Crude trading on unconfirmed reports of an intermediated US-Iran arrangement is a familiar pattern: Oman has repeatedly served as the back-channel in past rounds of US-Iran contact, and headlines citing Omani mediation have tended to move oil on the supply-risk premium rather than on fundamentals. The absence of official confirmation is the operative detail; in comparable episodes, crude has bid on the uncertainty and faded once either denial or confirmation removes the ambiguity, with the risk premium unwinding faster than it builds when talks prove substantive. Iran tabling a list of demands fits the established negotiating sequence of maximalist opening positions before any narrowing, and past rounds have typically gone through several such exchanges before terms converged or collapsed. The distinction worth drawing is between headlines that change the probability of incremental Iranian barrels returning to market and those that merely shift the geopolitical temperature; the former re-prices the forward curve more durably, the latter mostly the front. Follow-ons are official comment from either capital, any movement in freight and insurance costs in the Gulf, and whether options skew in WTI and Brent begins to price the tail rather than just the headline.