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Iran declares Strait of Hormuz completely open to commercial ships during Israel- Lebanon ceasefire, but US naval blockade stays in place
Still no significant movement on the maritime trackers. Ships are still grouped at the anchorages on both sides of the Strait. But Trump says Iran is working with the US to remove them. If Trump offers sanctions reliefs and ends the US blockade (which I doubt) in exchange for giving up their nuclear program and ceasing support for proxies against Israel, maybe this war could end quickly and we can return to pre-war status quo by the end of the year.
This is as close to a win-win situation as we can get. For Israel, there's a weaker defeated Iran in the region without means to develop nuclear weapons quickly, and for Iran, they get to survive and have access to sustenance funds. Trump can also claim some victory points for his base.
All of this is of course assuming Trump is being truthful and wants to end the war that he started. There's so much we don't understand or know behind the scenes.
From what I get this basically seems to have been mutual bluff calling and Iran keeps winning it. The Trump admin tried to pull away from ending Israel's war in Lebanon during the ceasefire so Iran just kept the strait closed and Trump finally pulled Bibi in line. Now Trump is saying the blockade will continue so Iran is going "nope, strait still closed then till you lift it" and yep, it still seems to be mostly closed.
Maybe but Iran giving up their enriched uranium doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon. Even going out to the end of the year, the US obtaining it (any quantity) by any means is still <50%. Weirdly enough agree to surrender is higher at 70% by end of the year but that seems to be because it's agree to surrender (again, any amount), rather than actually surrendering it as it says with "An agreement by Iran to surrender its enriched uranium stockpile as a precondition of a more comprehensive peace process or deal will qualify, even if the agreement is not finalized or part of a formalized peace deal"" so it doesn't have to actually happen. So even something like "10% of uranium for sanctions relief" and then they never give the 10% could count.
Polymarket numbers aren't really indicative of anything until that 5 minutes before an official release where all the liquidity is suddenly gooooone. Even if you had solid fairs for this kinda stuff the insane level of adverse selection makes it impractical to trade. The Prediction market thing makes a lot more sense for regularly occurring phenomena like sports betting
More accurate the closer things get is true, but they still seem to be pretty accurate at least a few months yet. I don't know if there's been any analysis of longer term prediction accuracy, but short/mid term seems to be fine. The insider trading makes a lot of personal money, but I'm not sure it's ever been enough to meaningfully change the odds. Maybe something goes from 70% to 90% or whatever.
Like consider how even the 580 million in oil futures traded recently is apparently a small fraction of the trillion+ that gets traded each day. At least this is what I get from double checking with ChatGPT "Total notional trading volume is often in the hundreds of billions of dollars per day In active periods, it can exceed $1 trillion+ daily".
Maybe it's more accurate on those but again, still seems pretty accurate on other things as well. The basic idea at least that people are throwing up their money into a wisdom of the crowds and anyone who thinks they know better can go bet against it holds true does it not?
The Trump admin insider traders do love to wait for the last minute but unless they've got it institutionalized and are taking turns or something, and for some reason Iranian insiders wouldn't do their own insider trading, there should be people who try to come in even earlier and eventually cause a race to the bottom on how early you have to insider trade.
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