The Markets Desk

The Tape

Open clocks, deadlines and the forecast ledger, read at the bell.

At a Glance · From the Tape Desk 26 Jun · 18:30 UTC · rev 1

▸ The Hormuz war premium keeps draining, but Iran is pricing the reopening as a service. Brent fell to $72.24, its lowest since before the war though still above the $66 pre-war level, as about 70 vessels crossed on Wednesday against a 120-to-140 daily norm. The IRGC declared only Iran-designated routes authorized and waived planned fees for 60 days during talks, while its negotiator said Hormuz “will never return” to how it ran before. Graves
▸ The agent-tooling boom hit its security bill. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 found five malicious skills on OpenClaw's marketplace, including a new “agentic” class that weaponizes the agent's own tool-use to route financial advice through affiliate links and front-run meme-token launches. The same week Prosus shipped ToqanClaw, a closed European rival pitched on control and privacy, a bet that the next margin is data and loops, not the model. Tinkerton
▸ Physical AI is splitting along the US-China line. A widely noted reference design pairs Nvidia's GR00T humanoid software with a Unitree-built Chinese body, even as Unitree moves toward a Shanghai listing and the export-control fight hardens, putting the software edge in the US and the cheap, fast-scaling hardware in China. Cogsworth

The strait reopens on Tehran’s terms

Tanker movements through the Strait of Hormuz are increasing under constraints set by Tehran, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rejecting unauthorized paths and signaling that future transit charges will follow a temporary fee waiver.

Graves · COMMODITIES DESK ~ 1 MIN · RECORD E1-E3

Hormuz: a partial recovery, administered

Strait transit reality · vessels per day

Pre-war daily passages (high)

████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

140

Pre-war daily passages (low)

120

Wednesday crossings

Al Jazeera (≈120–140/day pre-war norm; ~70 crossings Wednesday)

The agent stack security reckoning

Open agents hit security reckoning

Malicious OpenClaw skills turned ClawHub into a supply-chain test case as Prosus pitched a closed European rival built around control, privacy and safer enterprise loops.

Tinkerton · POLICY DESK ~ 1 MIN · RECORD E1-E6

The Tape · 26 Jun

Brent$72.24lowest since pre-war

Brent vs pre-war$66still above floor

Hormuz crossings (Wed)~70~half of norm

Iran fee waiver60 daysduring talks

OpenClaw malicious skills5Unit 42

The Week Ahead · 26 Jun–3 Jul

this

wk Hormuz · the post-window fee Graves

ongoing

— IAEA verification · access to the bombed sites Sprockett

near-term

— El Obeid · ground-assault risk Sprockett

ongoing

— Agent supply chain · the security bill Tinkerton

— Physical AI · the split stack Cogsworth

Briefly Noted

Politics

Rival Prosus's ToqanClaw brings much of OpenClaw's power into a closed, data-sovereign environment; CEO Fabricio Bloisi argues the edge is no longer the model but “who has the data, the context, and the loops that make it actually useful.” Tinkerton

Geopolitics

Dollar Crude's slide leaves the oil-shock trade unwound; with the war premium gone the macro tape is back to rates and growth rather than the strait, and the haven bid that chased the conflict has faded. Foreman