Probability
How the price has moved
The market's public history is short. It was first recorded on 29 July 2026 at 100%, an opening level typical of a newly listed contract before meaningful trading volume builds up, and it briefly held in a 99%-to-100% band. It then fell sharply to trade near 1%, where it has stayed since, with the most recent 24-hour move a modest 0.2 percentage point rise. Across the 58 price observations recorded so far, the market has shown no sign of genuine uncertainty about the outcome — the sharp early drop looks like price discovery correcting an unrepresentative opening print, not a reaction to new information, and there is no single publicly reported trigger behind either the initial level or the subsequent fall.
Analysis
Context
The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel between Iran and Oman, is the route for a large share of the world's seaborne oil and gas exports. When transit through it slows, that slowdown shows up in freight and insurance markets within days, and IMF PortWatch — a joint IMF and Oxford-backed project that tracks vessel movements through global chokepoints using satellite data — is one of the few public, near-real-time sources that measures exactly how many ships are still moving through it.
This market was built around a specific, checkable number: does the 7-day moving average of ship arrivals through Hormuz reach 60 on any day up to and including 31 July 2026. That threshold stands in for what IMF PortWatch and market participants treat as a normal pace of transit, the level the strait ran at before whatever disruption pushed traffic down. The question does not ask whether tensions have eased or a ceasefire has been signed; it asks only whether the ship count recovers to that specific level by that specific date.
Because the resolution source is public and updated frequently, this is one of the more mechanically simple geopolitical markets to price. There is little room for interpretation once the data is published, which is part of why the market has settled so firmly at one end of the range.
The consensus price across venues sits at 1%, with $5,250,758 in volume traded on Kalshi, the only venue currently listing this market. That combination — a price pinned near the floor and several million dollars of volume behind it — indicates a market that has done its work: a large number of participants have looked at the same public shipping data and arrived at nearly the same conclusion, rather than a thin, untested price.
The history is worth explaining rather than taking at face value. The market was first recorded on 29 July 2026 at 100%, and traded in a 99%-to-100% band in that opening window before falling sharply to its current level near 1%. A newly listed market often opens at an extreme, default-like price before enough participants have traded against it; the subsequent collapse to 1% is the market correcting that opening price once real positions were taken, not a sign that the underlying situation changed overnight. The move in the last 24 hours is small by comparison — a 0.2 percentage point rise, taking the price from roughly 0.8% to 1% — consistent with a market that has already found its level and is drifting only slightly as the 31 July deadline approaches.
The structural reason the price sits this low is timing. The resolution window closes on 31 July 2026, which from today, 30 July 2026, leaves essentially one more day of shipping data to be published. Reaching a 7-day moving average of 60 arrivals is not something that happens in a single day of high traffic; it requires roughly a week of consistently normal transit volumes behind it, which means the relevant week's worth of data was effectively already locked in before this market started trading in earnest. With 58 price observations recorded and the price holding within a single percentage point of its floor across nearly all of them, the market is signalling that it sees this as a near-certain No rather than a genuinely contested outcome.
What moves the probability
One day left on the clock
The resolution window ends 31 July 2026, and a 7-day moving average needs roughly a week of already-normal traffic behind it to clear 60. With one day of new data left to arrive, there is almost no runway for the average to climb that far, which pushes the price toward zero.
IMF PortWatch update cadence
Settlement depends entirely on when and how IMF PortWatch publishes its next reading. If that update lags past 31 July under the stated data-lag provision, the market still resolves No, reinforcing rather than offsetting the low price.
Underlying Gulf security conditions
Shipping through Hormuz only returns to a normal pace once insurers, shipowners and naval escorts judge the route safe enough to resume full-volume transits. Any sign of continued risk premiums or rerouting keeps daily arrival counts below the 60 threshold.
Market seeding versus real trading
The jump from a 100% opening price on 29 July to near 1% within the same short history reflects the market correcting an initial, thinly traded price rather than a shift in the facts on the ground. Volume of over $5.2 million now backs the 1% level, which is a stronger signal than the opening print.
The case for
- IMF PortWatch would need to publish a 7-day moving average of 60 or more daily ship arrivals on or before 31 July 2026.
- That would require a near-complete return to pre-disruption transit volumes sustained for close to a week, not a single day of heavy traffic.
- Shipowners and insurers would need to have already resumed full-volume routing through the strait well before the deadline for the seven-day average to reach that level in time.
- A rapid, unreported de-escalation in Gulf tensions in the final days of July would be the most direct route to that outcome.
The case against
- The resolution window closes 31 July 2026, leaving at most one more day of new data to move a 7-day average that requires a sustained recovery, not a single-day spike.
- The market consensus has held within a single percentage point of its floor across 58 recorded price observations, indicating broad agreement that the threshold will not be met in time.
- If IMF PortWatch's update lags past 31 July under the data-lag provision, the market resolves No regardless of what the underlying traffic level actually is by then.
- A return to a 60-arrival average implies conditions closer to normal Gulf shipping operations than anything reflected in the market's pricing history to date.