Hormuz cliffed on March 2. Oil priced it in twelve days earlier.

On 18 February, WTI crude broke +4.6% in a single session and held the level. Brent did the same. Gold had already been climbing since 2 February — $4,622 to $5,230 by 27 February, a +13% rally through quiet weeks. None of this made the news. Something was being priced.

On 2 March, the Strait of Hormuz transit count collapsed from ~17 ships/day to 4. IMF PortWatch now reads Hormuz at −87.7% vs its 90-day baseline — isolated to Hormuz (Suez, Malacca, Bab el-Mandeb stayed normal). WTI went $71 on the cliff day to $91 within four sessions, $98.7 by 13 March. The news lagged the price by roughly two to four weeks, depending on which instrument you were watching.

DAMUS had 2026 flagged as a geopolitical-escalation year from 1 January — driven by Saturn-Neptune conjunction (p=0.02), the Hale solar peak carry-through, Shemitah post-year (p=0.0158), and Pisano crisis-DR context. The framework had the signal. The workflow did not run a forecast until infrastructure caught up in March, ten days after the fact. This week we shipped the fix: a rolling 90-day DAMUS forecast that regenerates weekly. Full framework.