Friday, April 24th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

Two clocks, one outcome. A global energy depression and a stock market crash in the balance. Tick…tick…tick….

The first is ticking in Washington. The President notified Congress of his military operation in Iran on March 2nd. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, he has sixty days to conduct that operation without Congressional approval. That sixty day deadline is May 2nd.

The President can unilaterally extend his operation by another thirty days by writing to Congress. But, he’s technically only allowed to do so if those thirty days are required to conduct the safe withdrawal of US forces. War over.

Congress could step in and pass a resolution authorizing continued military force with a simple majority in both the House or the Senate. Or–and here’s a radical idea–Congress could do its duty and exercise its authority under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution and vote, by a simple majority, to declare war.

The Congress has only done that eleven times in American history. The last was in 1942. Since 1942 there have been 15 ‘conflicts’ in which Congress ought to have declared war but did not. Congress will not do its duty.

Technically, the President’s special military operation ought to end next week. Realistically, it could go on for at least another 30 days. And historically, based on the post 9/11 world, it could last years or decades. But in the short term, we have one clock ticking in DC.

The other is in Iran. Like everyone else in the Gulf, Iran is shipping a lot less oil these days. Their wells can keep producing as long as they have room to store that oil. But according to unofficial figures, the Iranians will run out of available storage for their oil sometime in mid May. And then?

And then they will have to ‘shut in’ their producing wells. A ‘shut in’ turns an oil well into a static pressure vessel. The longer the ‘shut in’ the more potential damage to the oil well itself, or the long-term production of the oil reservoir below it. And obviously, you can’t sell or ship oil you aren’t producing anymore. Tick Tick. Tick.

The global oil market has lost close to 700 million barrels of oil since the war began and the Strait was closed. If things ‘normalized’ today, clearing out the tanker traffic and resuming production would take time. It will be a billion barrels of ‘lost’ oil before you know it. And it will take years and billions of dollars/yuan of investment to repair the damage to energy infrastructure already inflicted (mostly by Iran on Gulf states).

This is the largest ‘oil shock’ in history, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). It’s affecting supply and refiners and distillate products all over the world. But the only reason it isn’t an even BIGGER shock yet is that the supply shock has been met by about four million barrels per day of demand destruction.

High oil prices HAVE affected affordability/demand in those markets furthest away from the Gulf or least able to pay or find a substitute supplier. But the supply shock and demand destruction have more or less cancelled each other out at the moment. This gives the appearance of a weirdly stable status quo, where you can have the biggest energy shock ever…but have no real-world consequences.

I would not expect that to last. I’m leaving out the question of whether financial markets have been used to distort the contract/paper prices for oil. This would be a form of ‘narrative’ control to show that the war was going fine and there was no oil crisis. But the ‘real’ price–what users are paying to unload oil–is already much higher than the ‘paper’ price in some markets.

Another weird situation. High prices will destroy demand for people at the end of the supply chain, or without friends in oil-rich places. But that demand destruction may counter falling supply and allow for ‘stable’ oil prices. For a while. Until when?

Well, either things get back to something like normal or they don’t. My guess is that the supply disruption is still wending its way through global supply chains. Higher prices and real shortages will show up in the summer, if not sooner. And it will show up in a politically sensitive food prices (shortages). All of THAT is assumes the worst of the interrupted flows and damaged infrastructure is behind us. And stocks? See below.

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Chiswick, West London

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

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Friday, April 17th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

It snowed in Laramie today. Sigh. And we’ve received a few letters and messages in the last few weeks to be less encouraging us to be less negat…

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Wednesday, April 15

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

The 2026 Ruffer Review is out. It’s one of my favorite publications and I look forward to reading it every year. Ruffer is an asset management business based in London. They’re extremely risk averse and place great emphasis on long-term preservation of capital. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I admit. But if you like reading long philosophical essays about markets and finance, it’s a must-read. I discovered it a few years ago after it was recommended in Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.

You can read it here.

Also, Anthony Deden of Edelweiss Holdings, published an essay this week, his first article in six months. Deden is another of my favorite financial thinkers. He emphasizes preservation of capital over returns. This essay is about the erosion of the important principles that made the US so rich. Deden loves gold. In this great (and 2.5 hours long) interview from 2018, which we’ve linked to before, Deden says he owns three tons of gold in his fund, more than most central banks!

Here’s the YouTube clip.

And here’s the essay.

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Friday, April 10th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

The tankers are coming! The tankers are coming!

A ‘wave’ of Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCS) are headed around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa for the Gulf Coast in America. As Tom has pointed out for a few years now, the VLCCs carry between 1.9 and 2.1 million barrels of crude oil. Please see Tom’s note from Wednesday on how to manage strength in our tanker stocks.

Normally, 80% of the oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz would be headed to Asia. The times, they ain’t a normal. Industry publications show that 40 VLCC ‘liftings’ are booked in American ports for April. The average is 27. It’s not an oil armada yet. But it does set up an interesting tension.

US exports of crude oil could be set to boom. It’s a bit of a paradox. This week’s CPI and core personal consumption expenditure data show that rising energy prices are already driving up inflation in the US. The CPI data is from March and the PCE data was from February. It’s likely to get worse (higher energy prices) before it gets better.

Yet the US is on pace to export over five million barrels of oil a day to markets that can’t get it easily from anywhere else. What are we to make of this? Is it politically tenable to endure higher energy prices in the US while exports hit new highs?

Jeff Currie from Carlyle thinks we have an emerging conflict between the ‘electrostate’ and the ‘petrostate’. Up in the air is the 50-year global bargain where the US provided a blanket of security through trillions in military spending in exchange for ‘dollar dominance’ (the recycling of oil money back into US government bonds and financial assets like stocks). Without the security, the dollar’s dominance can’t last. The bargain is ended.

You’ll recognize Currie’s name if you were around for the last commodity supercycle in the first decade of the 21st century. He ran the commodities desk at Goldman Sachs and was one of the top analysts for how the price hike, investment boom, and production boom would play out for investors (most of this was driven by huge levels of fixed asset investment in China in things like bridges, railroads, housing and airpots…while the US was bleeding trillions of dollars in the deserts of Iraq).

What he’s suggesting now is that the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed to anyone Iran and China want to exclude. This gives China, in Currie’s analysis, global control over critical minerals, rare earths, microchips, and ‘oil access’ for countries that are not energy self-sufficient. In this environment, he forecasts a huge rotation back into heavy industry and energy. Asset heavy over capital light, if you want to put it in balance sheet terms.

Whatever you think about the thesis, it sure doesn’t look like the Strait of Hormuz is open. Or that there’s a ceasefire in hostilities. Or that there’s anything in the world that can prevent coming fuel and food shortages, driven by the disruption to global energy transportation. Some people have already felt the pain. Others will soon enough. And investors?

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Wednesday, April 8

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

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Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

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Wednesday, April 1st, 2026

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

The first quarter of 2026 is now in the books. Here’s how our top ideas performed over the quarter:

• Gold +4%

• Silver +6.5%

• Platinum -7.4%

• Trade of the Decade +44.6%

• Our 7 energy stocks +33.2%

• Uranium +3.7%

Even our cash and short term bills have done well. There’s been a clear trend of HIGHER short term interest rates around the world, something almost no one had expected. The 2-year US treasury note is currently yielding 3.88%.

Here’s the US government yield curve. Notice the 0.5% rise in short term interest rates during March:

I’ve no idea what to expect over the rest of 2026… almost anything is possible. That’s the point. We’re not speculating or forecasting. We’re playing defense. We’re braced for almost any scenario, including a lot of uncomfortable volatility (as we’re seeing in oil equities today.) We’re not changing anything.

QUESTION: I am not real clear. Are you saying to buy the SLVR we sold in January back at this time?

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Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

Let’s return to basic physics to explain why the world–and financial markets–are woefully unprepared for the interruption to global energy flows in the Middle East and the destruction/degradation of oil production and export infrastructure. It’s all physics. But with a weird twist.

Light is an electromagnetic wave that travels at 300 million meters per second. Sound is a mechanical pressure wave. It travels at 340 meters per second. You see a large explosion first (if you’re watching it from a safe distance and not the target of it). Then you hear it, and possibly feel it (the pressure wave). Here’s an example, based on the demolition of the second stage of a C-4 Trident rocket motor.

We see things happening on the TV over in Iran, Qatar, Baltic oil terminals that ship Russian oil, and Saudi Arabia. But their economic effects don’t travel with equal speed to all parts of the world. We should pay attention to these effects. They may be headed your way soon.

• Australia, which has only two working oil refineries and imports most of its transportation and aviation fuel, has a new national dashboard showing which gas stations are running out of diesel and other fuels.

• South Korea announced a five-day vehicle rotation system for public sector vehicles that determines who can drive each day.

• The Philippines has declared a national fuel emergency, in which the government can control who gets fuel and when, as well as price controls (to prevent hoarding by consumers and price gouging by producers, they say).

In supply chain terms, the further you are away from your refined fuels, the more likely you are to feel the effects of the closure of the Stait of Hormuz first. It’s not happening yet in the United States or Europe. But even if shipping of crude oil and other products through the Strait of Hormuz were to resume today, there is a lag or delay in oil at sea that is going to show up in the real economy even as the oil itself does not show up for days, weeks, or months (depending on how long this goes on).

It’s not quite Mad Max. Not yet. But a bit later, I’ll show you what the global elites think we should all do to prepare. It’s all sounding very much like the early stages of the pandemic, when it was just ‘two weeks to stop the spread’ and we were ‘all in it together’ (we weren’t). The energy lockdowns are coming. But first, what about US financial markets? Take a look at the chart below.

Inflation adjusted returns in the stock market are likely to be negative for seven to ten years after a mean-reverting crash in stock prices. We’ve said it so many times in the last few years that it probably goes in one ear and out the other. This week, I ran across a chart that shows it, which I’ve shared with you above. What does it show?

It shows the nominal performance, in percentage terms, for the Dow Industrials and the S&P 500 during the last oil shock, which lasted nine years, from roughly 1973 to 1982 (at which point stocks were a screaming buy). Not great results. The S&P was up 3.81% over the nine years. The Dow was down 14.22%. But…

But the inflation of the oil shock led to a 55% decline in purchasing power over the same nine years. Your inflation adjusted returns–your real returns after the decline in the value of your money–were much lower than the nominal returns. Even modest paper gains in stocks were cosmetic and couldn’t paper over the damage done to the value of your money.

By the way, in gold terms, stocks got clobbered over that nine years. Gold was up early during the energy shock (1973 and 1974) and up again late (1979). Adjusting for gold’s performance over the same nine years, the S&P 500 was down over 83% and the Dow was down 86%. And even if you include the nominal performance of the S&P 500 total returns index (which includes reinvested dividends), you still get a 74% decline in the S&P 500 over the nine years. Now look at this.

Let’s say that the war in Iran actually strengthens Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz. Or, in a worse case scenario, escalation in the coming weeks results in the massive destruction of energy infrastructure throughout the Gulf. The result would be soaring oil prices that would last years, not months. What happens to stocks then?

We’re already at a valuation peak (price-to-sales, CAPE, market cap-to-GDP). But we also have a cyclical concentration of investor money in the same sector of the market. It was the Nifty Fifty when the 1970s energy shock began. Japan in 1989 (before an 89% fall in the Nikkei). Then the TMT stocks of the dot.com boom. And now the AI ‘Big Ten) are 41% of the market—Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, Broadcom, Oracle, and Palantir.

It’s going to be hard to run–much less build—AI data centers when the shockwaves of a global energy crisis are running through the metals and critical minerals supply chain (although this MAY accelerate the development and deployment of small modular nuclear reactors and next gen nuclear power). You wonder if the projected data center cap ex numbers are being revised as we speak, with the stock market re-valuation to follow.

In the meantime, there are still disturbing problems with private credit and all the nooks and crannies it flowed into during the last boom. This week, Swiss bank UBS ‘gated’ redemptions in a $470 million European real estate fund. If you want your money out, you may have to wait as many 36 months…and by then, it might be worth a lot less.

The government bond market is no place to hide either. Total global government debt is now 100% of global GDP. You could make a very good argument that the epicenter of the next debt crisis is in government bonds. The entire financial model of the modern Welfare/Warfare state may blow up.

What does that mean?

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Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

Today we look at ‘dots’ in the form of charts. Then we connect them. No (or very little) history. No geography. No theology. No philosophy. No ba…

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Wednesday, March 18th, 2026

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

The FOMC met today. They kept short term interest rates between 3.5% and 3.75%.

Without easier credit (lower interest r…

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Friday, March 13th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

The math is brutal. And inevitable. If you thought a trillion dollar deficit halfway through the government’s fiscal year was bad, you’re right. If you thought $40 trillion in debt (a 100% increase in the last ten years, from $19.2 trillion 2016) was a problem, you’re also right. But a problem when? And how? And as investors, what should we do about it?

The problem is now. And the threat is a continuation of the Primary Trend that began in 2020, higher interest rates for the next cycle; ‘cycle’ being loosely defined as this new era in money, interest rates, politics, military affairs, and the 21st century American Empire.

But what does all THAT mean?

The government assumes it will have to refinance around $30 trillion in maturing and new debt over the next ten years at an average interest rate of 4.2%. If rates are pushed higher by inflation, to say 5%, that’s $1.5 trillion in new interest expense on debt that needs to be refinanced and around $500 billion on new debt. Let’s call it $2 trillion–and remember that’s on TOP of the $1 trillion per year we’re paying now.

But wait!

Observe the chart below. In the last stagflationary cycle of the 1970s (the introduction of the credit collar, oil embargo, big move in gold prices) interest rates on the 10-year US Treasury note were well above 5%. They peaked above 15% (with the Fed funds target rate closer to 20%). Now here’s the scary math…

At an average 10-year yield of 10%, interest expense grows by $15 trillion over the next ten years. Around $11 trillion is the bill for refinancing debt that matures in the next ten years. Add in another $4 trillion on new debt issued to cover annual deficits of $2 trillion.

You see the problem. The solution, as Bill mentioned in our Private Briefing recorded yesterday, is not complicated. Cut federal spending back to 2019 levels. That would balance the budget with today’s revenues. Then slash defense spending, means test Social Security benefits, and end the foreign wars. Put America and Americans first and return to sound money (which might require higher interest rates if you are to find buyers of your debt in the free market rather than having the Fed print up the money to finance the Warfare/Welfare state).

No one in Washington, except Congressman Thomas Massie and Senator Rand Paul (both from Kentucky) seem willing to vote for anything that would prevent the looming fiscal disaster from destroying American standards of living and quality of life. So we will have to fend for ourselves, not wait on public policy or politicians, stay in Maximum Safety Mode, and try to take it year by year. Speaking of which…

Bill and I covered a lot of ground in his latest quarterly State of the World briefing. I’m having the video transcribed now and will publish it for you tomorrow. One thing we did NOT cover was the status of our current Trade of the Decade. Bill asked about that this morning via email and I sent him the chart you see above.

This covers the performance of XOP since we added it to the Official List in January of 2021. Gold and oil up, blue chips down. That’s it in a nutshell. And if you missed Tom’s update on Wednesday (Runaway Train), here was a key observation:

‘Oil is to the real economy as credit is to the banking system. When it dries up, everything grinds to a halt. The difference, of course, is the Feds can’t print their way out of an oil crunch, so it’ll be much harder for them to intervene.’

At the end of January, the gold/oil ratio was 83 (an ounce of gold divided by the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil). Except for April of 2020, when oil briefly went negative and the ratio spiked to 132, oil has seldom been cheaper in gold terms.

Or HAD been. That’s changing now. That is why Tom added oil and gas investments to the Official List.

I asked Bill if he recalled any ‘lag’ between the spike in oil prices in the 1970s and higher prices for everything else in the economy (gasoline and jet fuel obviously went up first). That’s the big question now: How quickly will a ‘closed’ Strait of Hormuz translate into higher inflation for producers AND consumers all over the world, and especially right here in the US of A?

The red line on the Fed chart above shows a second wave in the ‘sticky’ inflation measure tracked by the US central bank. Inflation AND inflation expectations went higher and stayed there. Higher inflation required higher nominal interest rates, something the US government simply cannot afford today (the debt-to-GDP ratio was 30% in 1974…it is 120% today).

What next?

The war with Iran could end quickly. It is in no one’s interests for the Strait to remain closed. The shock would trigger a global depression. But if the conflict drags on and the spice no longer flows, then inflation will be impossible to avoid. That may already be the case. The Treasury Secretary can try and manage the oil price lower through the futures markets. But at the end of the day, either the oil is flowing or it is not.

By the way, threatening to close the Strait was not an effective deterrent against a US attack on Iran’s nuclear program. But now that the genie is out of the bottle and the Strait is actually closed, it may prevent things from escalating further. Or not. We’ll see soon enough. In the meantime…

I’m on the lookout for signs that stress in the private credit market (gates and halted redemptions in funds with exposure to pre-public software companies) is leaking over into public markets and other assets. The issue, crudely simplified, is that if AI agents render the trillions in private investment in software companies…bad…well then this asset class is in trouble.

This would not be surprising. The kinds of ‘income’ promised by private credit funds are typical of late stage credit bubbles. Publicly listed stocks become over-valued. To sell more product, new vehicles are created to attract high net-worth speculative capital. The companies invested in often have no revenue–meaning the sky is the limit and valuations are irrelevant.

There is one big issue that comes up for anyone NOT involved in the private credit market. Investors who are panicked from losses in private markets sell publicly listed stocks, gold, and Treasury bonds–basically anything liquid that can cover losses. This leads to margin calls and more forced selling (margin lending is at a record $1.2 trillion and 6% of GDP, compared to 2.5% in 2000).

In other words, the blowing up of a bubble in a small, peripheral market in which you’re not invested is exactly the thing that can bring about a cascade of selling. It can also engineer a change in investor psychology, from greed to fear. And then to panic.

But I’m sure everything is contained and a blow up in private credit markets would never be the pin to prick the equity market bubble. Absolutely impossible. Called Ben Bernanke to double check. Confirmed. Move along. Nothing to see here.

HYG has rolled over. But it’s not in free fall yet.

Until next week,

Dan

P.S. Want to know what omniscient surveillance combined with AI targeting might look like? Check out this video. It shows the Maven integrated surveillance platform in action. Add Anthropic’s Claude to this and you get a rapid-fire analysis and targeting system for 21st century AI-drove-pre-emptive American warfare on a global scale.

As the cost of making war goes down, the frequency of violence goes up. That’s how it would normally work. But the way we measure both the ‘cost’ and the ‘returns’ on modern warfare are up in the air. AI tools may make war planning and intervention seem faster and foolproof and bloodless. But how did anyone at the Pentagon not foresee or measure the cost of Iran closing off a key oil choke-point?

It’s almost unfathomable that somewhere in the Pentagon’s thousands of pages of war plans, there isn’t a chapter or two dedicated to the worst case scenario in the Straight of Hormuz. But maybe technology has seduced our war planners and politicians into believing that wars can be fought and won in the same time it takes the average American to binge watch a streaming series on Netflix.

This is war as ‘workflow.’ And it’s extremely dangerous, especially with the chance that AIs could have autonomous ‘kill decision’ authority, or give themselves that authority without human permission. And let’s not forget that real human beings are put in harms way delivering weapons, fuel, and supplies, not to mention the people on the receiving end of our bombs. We also assume these powerful surveillance, targeting, and predictive algorithms would only be used against malicious foreign enemies and non-state actors.

But once the operational concept has been ‘proven’ and deemed successful, what is to prevent it from being used here in America against Americans? What kind of Americans? At first, it would be used to identify and prevent the kinds of shootings we’ve seen across the country this week. But later, against everyone. All the time. what then?

P.P.S. A lot HAS been happening with AI agents and the Pentagon. Stories on X quoted from a slide deck in which the Pentagon is soliciting Wall Street for traders to come and join the Pentagon’s Economic Defense Unit. The short version is the Department of War is looking for a team of 30 Wall Street analysts to invest $200 billion over three years.

The mission is to help ‘deter our largest adversary from gaining military superiority,’ to ‘reshore US manufacturing’ and secure ‘a better long-term future for Americans.’ This seems different from In-Q-Tel, the non-profit firm chartered by the CIA (officially) in 1999 to make venture capital investments in promising Silicon Valley technology firms.

This is more industrial. It’s a vast expansion on Project Vault, which seems more like a quick ‘sprint’ to fast-track critical mineral investment production and refining in the US (and shore up domestic supply chains) by making investments in publicly traded companies. From the slide deck, the new EDU will focus on six areas:

• Industrials (manufacturing, supply chain security, bulk materials, munitions, drones)

• Technology (warfighter enablement, dual-use tech, R&D)

• Telecommunications (undersea cables, satellites and space, spectrum and Future-g)

• Energy (generation, transmission, distribution, storage and battery technology)

• Global logistics (strategic maritime, logistics infrastructure, aerospace, heavy logistics)

• Metals and mining (exploration and extraction, processing, refining, conversion, end use)

Lots to unpack here. Are these the actions of a government already preparing for the next war (with China) before its finished the current war with Iran? It’s certainly a departure from fifty years of industrial and trade policy which favored Wall Street, the dollar (as a global weapon), and finance over manufacturing, industry, and trade. Will anyone on Wall Street do their patriotic duty and move to DC to join the team?

In the spirit of the age, I asked Claude (Anthropic’s AI) to act like a venture capitalist and build a portfolio of companies that might be in the cross-hairs of the EDU. I added a caveat that there should be ten large-cap ‘safe’ companies and then up to twenty hyper speculative or risky companies. I then checked for ‘hallucinations’ and accuracy with Perplexity (to make sure all these companies actually exist and all the news flow is accurately reported).

Please note that this is not investment advice and none of these positions are on the Official List.

As the Research Director, I’m sharing some of my raw research with you, using new (and untested) AI tools. There is a LOT more research to be done…and it’s not clear Pentagon investment in any of these companies (big or small) will move the needle on the stock price (some of the stocks are already expensive to begin with).

But if the US now has an industrial policy, and it resembles capitalism with late Soviet characteristics, then it’s a theme worth exploring. It could be that this marks a rejection of the post-Bretton Woods era of the credit dollar as the chief pillar of national security.

It could be that we’re returning to an FDR-style, top-down, wartime industrial policy where the government invests and intervenes (or even nationalizes) industries it deems critical to national security. If you’d like me to explore this subject further, leave a comment below.

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Wednesday, March 11th, 2026

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

We’ve had the dial set to “Maximum Defense” for four years. But if I could turn the dial any higher today, I would. W…

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Tempe, Arizona

By Dan Denning

The clock is ticking on the world as we know it. What happens when it expires depends on a lot of forces out of control–including whether American war planners accounted for the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. In this week’s note, I’ll show you the key numbers to watch. But first…

Investment Director Tom Dyson published a new trade from Mumbai this morning. Please make sure you review it here. The fog of war has descended on the global shipping industry with the war in Iran. Tom has spotted a chance–and a series of compelling reasons–to get back into some of the stocks we know best.

As Tom points out, this is a high risk trading environment. But it may also be high reward. If you’re not a trader, he advises you to sit this one out. But with 30% of the world’s sea-borne oil transiting the Persian Gulf, and 20% of its LNG trade, we’re navigating a situation people have talked about for years but never actually experienced. What exactly do I mean?

The Gulf Region is the energy heart of the modern world as we know it. It pumps out the oil, gas, and petrochemicals that keep the world economy beating. The Strait of Hormuz is the aorta of the heart. Rupture or interrupt it, and you get a global heart attack that might be fatal.

But how, exactly, would that happen? Is it the tingling you feel in your fingers when the gas price in Tempe goes up? Is it higher airline ticket prices as jet fuel costs increase? Where else might you see it and begin to pay for it? What about things like fertilizer, sulfates, ammonia…and the industries that depend on them? What about food?

I’ll get to the second and third order effects in a moment. But we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves. President Trump’s modus operandi is for one-and-done military interventions, usually targeted assassinations (which itself is a whole other topic of discussion). He may have departed from that here, or it may be out of his control. We’ll find out soon enough. Perhaps in the next 48 hours.

But let’s assume American war planners have no intention to put ‘boots on the ground’ in Iran, above and beyond those that are already there. Let’s further assume that part of the calculus for this campaign is that there are two limits to how long it lasts: the price of oil and political will.

Both are connected, of course. But let’s put in terms of numbers, hours, days, weeks, and months. And let’s start with a question: If the Straits of Hormuz were completely closed to sea-borne tanker traffic, how long would it be before Gulf nations had to quit pumping oil and gas?

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By Tom Dyson

This is the toughest update I’ve had to write yet — but I’m doing this anyway.

I’m adding back my three favorite tanker stocks DHT (pure-play VLCC), FRO (VLCCs and …

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Saturday, February 28th, 2026

Scottsdale, Arizona

By Dan Denning

Greetings from the scorched earth of the Arizona desert. I went to bed last night with the intention of adding a note or two to my weekly research brief. And then you wake up and another war has broken out in the Middle East. Let’s begin with that…and then move on to the Trade of the Decade, tokenized gold, then AI, and finally the Mountain Mormons versus the Amish.

So far–and it’s early days–the Israeli/US combat operations in Iran look like a leadership decapitation strike. That may change. But major oil infrastructure does not appear to be a target. Iran lobbed ballistic missiles at six sites in the region. But it does not appear, at least yet, to have escalated into a sustained aerial campaign from the US. And thank goodness it has not gone nuclear.

This is not 1991 or 2003. The US does not have the munitions to sustain a three-week aerial campaign against Iran. It may not need them, if the goal is the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards and key figures in the regime. And in any case, it may be enough to interrupt (or eventually halt) the flow of Iranian oil to China. Between the Venezuelan regime change and this action in Iran, it appears the US is choking off China’s supply of oil. And what about oil?

The Trump Administration has added about 20 million barrels of oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) from the 40-year low at 346 million barrels. It’s limited to how much it can add by Congressional funding to refill what was run down during the Biden years. Still, a 20% increase gives the US a bit more margin for error in riding out any disruption to global oil flows if Iran is able to disrupt tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

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Wednesday, February 25

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

In case you missed it, we adjusted our allocations. We reduced our cash allocation by 5% and increased our stock allocatio…

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Scottsdale, Arizona

By Dan Denning

It looks like I picked the wrong Friday to move the Western HQ of BPR from Laramie to Scottsdale. While your editor was busy migrating so…

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Wednesday, February 18th, 2026

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

They called it the Milkshake.

For at least 15 years — and arguably for a lot longer — the U.S. relentlessly sucke…

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Friday, February 13th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

Trigger warning: There were a lot of dots this week. America’s looming date with yield curve control…a new gold price forecast…alarming news f…

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