While the world’s top oil traders parsed satellite images and Pentagon briefings for clues about the fate of the Strait of Hormuz, a small Manhattan research firm came up with the idea to just go there on a speedboat.
Citrini Research, the boutique firm that rattled AI investors with a bearish call earlier this year, says it packed a Pelican case with $15,000 in cash, a high-zoom Xiaomi phone, a gimbal, a microphone kit, and a roll of tobacco-free nicotine pouches Zyn, and dispatched an analyst to the most consequential chokepoint in global energy markets.
About 20% of the world’s oil and 25% of its liquefied natural gas pass through the 54-mile passage between Iran and Oman.
“Nobody — literally nobody, not the analysts, not the correspondents, not the retired generals doing hits on cable news” knew what was actually happening, Citrini wrote. Everyone, it said, was working from “the same stale satellite imagery and the same unnamed Pentagon sources.”
Into The Strait
The analyst, whom the firm calls only “Analyst #3” to avoid identification, crossed into Oman’s Musandam Peninsula — the rocky finger of land that juts into the strait from the south.
Against the advice of Omani border officials and two Coast Guard officers holding assault rifles, #3 hired a speedboat with no GPS, captained by a man he had met three hours earlier at a port inlet by pulling out a wad of cash, and headed into open water. He rode to within eighteen miles of the Iranian coast while Shahed drones flew overhead and Revolutionary Guard patrol boats ran patterns in the distance.
He was eventually intercepted, detained, and had his phone confiscated by Coast Guard authorities before making it back to New York for what the firm described as an “eight-hour debrief.”
What The Data Is Missing
What the analyst found challenges the narrative driving oil markets. Ships are still moving — at roughly 15 vessels per day, with volume picking up in the days before publication, according to Citrini’s report.
The firm argues that the standard AIS ship-tracking system, which broadcasts a vessel’s location, speed, and identity, is badly undercounting actual traffic. “Tankers passing through four or five a day, completely dark on AIS,” the report said. “The volume, they said, is higher than what the data suggests, and it’s been accelerating in the past couple days through the Qeshm channel.”
A Checkpoint, Not A Blockade
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the report says, is selectively permitting vessels to transit after securing prior approval, creating what Citrini described as “a functional checkpoint” at the world’s most important oil artery.
“This should drive home that what we’ve described as our view of the conflict is nuanced,” the firm wrote. “It doesn’t fit neatly into ‘strait open, crude down’ or ‘strait closed, crude parabolic.’”
The Trade
Citrini’s investment conclusion is that the disruption is real but slow-burning — not a binary blow-up. “We think the disruption is longer and the new normal involves a permanent risk premium,” the firm wrote, adding that it expects traffic to recover to as much as 50% of pre-conflict levels within four to six weeks.
That view underpins a preference for longer-dated crude exposure. The firm favors December 2026 WTI contracts over front-month — a bet that the damage embeds itself into oil prices over time rather than resolving quickly.
To be sure, the findings are based on a single field trip and anecdotal accounts that are difficult to verify independently.
Image via Shutterstock
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