Paul Adams

“By all means, watch the gauges. Just do not forget that Tehran tends to read them differently.” Why Iran’s Oil Pain Does Not Guarantee Capitulation mei.edu/publication/wh…

Why Iran's oil pipelines probably won't "explode." energypolicy.columbia.edu/irans-oil-sect…

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue. On April 21st, the left screen moved first. I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug. At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy. On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me. At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire. Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83. I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags. My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports. The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026: Reviewed. That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one. Let me show you my flags. March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it. March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it. April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it. April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it. April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it. That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one. The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March. Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012. Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence. Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets. The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade. I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email. The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action. One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared. One account is a coincidence. But there were six. Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000. My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger. March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes. The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event. The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting." Then the White House sent the email again. I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread. I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated. But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed. Zero prosecutions. As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations. I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations. The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still. In my field, we call this price discovery.

The military man trying to save US-Iran peace talks via @FT giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/ac…

I was wondering how long it would be before we saw this headline

CHART OF THE DAY: The size of the 🇨🇳 Chinese strategic petroleum reserve is mind blowing: larger than 🇺🇸 US + 🇯🇵 Japan + the whole of 🇪🇺 Western Europe combined. Via @EIAgov — more: eia.gov/todayinenergy/…

A very volatile and distressing situation west of Hormuz. Yesterday, when the Strait of Hormuz “opened” and then shut so quickly, @WindwardAI detected at least 33 outbound ships reversing course mid-transit. You can imagine how terrifying that was for the hundreds of crew on those containerships, VLCCs, LNG carriers and bulk carriers that had to turn around. Vessels abandoned Hormuz transits as the IRGC fired on one tanker and shot projectiles at another containership. The “completely open” strait (according to Iran’s foreign minister on April 17) is now shut again to most commercial traffic. That hasn’t stopped Iran’s dark fleet and other Iran-linked ships at least making an attempt to break the US blockade. Over the past 36 hours, eight vessels that had called at Iran ports or were sailing to Iran ports were also tracked reversing course.  At least two of these were observed this morning in the last few hours, at least one far out in the Gulf of Oman. (and while I was writing this and just checking my numbers I found a third) So what did get out in that brief period of time? Not much oil. Of the six tankers tracked outbound via AIS that had no Iran links was just one VLCC (sailing for China) and another LPG carrier (also for China). A few ships turned off their AIS in the midst of the chaos and made it out. All up  ~12 ships got out. Those included three passenger vessels that exited Hormuz using the southern corridor in Omani waters. Iran is accelerating workarounds and deceptive shipping practices as the US blockade bites. There were at least six ships assessed as linked to Iran that came inbound in the last 36 hours –mostly to the port of Bandar Abbas -- by hugging the Iranian coastline all the way along the Gulf of Oman, including at least two Iran-flagged containerships that had previously called at China and India. This morning the media are saying that Hormuz has “ground to a standstill” and closed again. I would argue it was never open, as there was no freedom of navigation – all ships still needed IRGC permission. And therein lies the problem. The events of the past 24 hours are a major setback for global trade. What nascent confidence there was among maritime stakeholders (shipowners, oil traders, war risk marine insurers, big container lines and oil cargo insurers  -- given so many laden VLCCs turned around) has evaporated. They won’t be so quick to return next time either Iran or the US declares the strait open amid some tenuous ceasefire deal. Those transit reversals all took place within 24 hours of the Iranian announcement. This morning the BBC interviewed the master of one of the vessels that did so. He spoke of the profound anxiety of the crew and the psychological distress of the events. Let’s not forget this.

As good an explanation as you will see from the excellent @JavierBlas

sums up the confusion (and fear) being experienced by vessels trying to pass through the Strait of Hormuz

President Trump says the Strait of Hormuz is open. But do note Tehran says shipping traffic needs to follow the "coordinated route as already announced” by Iran. What's that route? My @Opinion video explainer, published originally last week, shows it.

Is the scene gradually being set for the next round of US-Iranian talks? bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

Another first for Ukraine?

I see your blockade and I raise you. Trump's latest gamble. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

“Ghalibaf…impressed the American team as a refined and professional bargainer.” washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/…

Washington’s “military options are costly, its diplomatic leverage is limited, and time is increasingly working against it.”

The five big sticking points in US-Iran talks bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

An excellent summary of how we got here….🤷‍♂️

Trump is seeking an agreement... As I wrote just today: For Washington, this presents a familiar but sharpened dilemma. Israel, for both political and military reasons, is unlikely to significantly reduce operations in Lebanon in the near term. Yet without some degree of de-escalation, diplomacy has little chance of gaining traction. The likely result is growing U.S. pressure to slow the pace of military activity, not through formal constraints, but through quiet coordination aimed at buying time for negotiations. x.com/citrinowicz/st…

“Negotiations on an issue this complex require time and, crucially, a sustained and continuous negotiating process, not a ‘touch-and-go’ approach.”

There Is No Clean Way Out of Iran Iran’s predictable rejection of the latest U.S. proposal should dispel any remaining illusions in Washington: there is no simple path to ending this confrontation. As mentioned in the past, the gap between the two sides is not merely tactical, it is structural. Tehran’s demands remain fundamentally incompatible with American expectations. But the deeper problem is this: the United States lacks a credible military option that can force Iran into submission. Even significant strikes on Iran’s infrastructure would not produce capitulation. They would invite retaliation, reinforce regime resolve, and likely trigger escalation across the region. The assumption that pressure alone can break Tehran is not strategy, it is wishful thinking. This leaves the administration with a narrowing set of choices, none of them attractive. A negotiated outcome will almost certainly require accommodating at least some Iranian demands. Politically difficult, but strategically coherent. The alternative is a broader military campaign that promises no decisive end state. There will be no “shock and awe” moment that resolves the Iran problem. Instead, escalation risks pulling the United States into a protracted conflict, one defined not by victory, but by endurance, cost, and uncertainty. Washington now faces a familiar dilemma: accept an imperfect deal, or slide into an open-ended confrontation with no clear exit. #IranWar‌