citrini’s huge balled analyst undercover trip through the strait
**TL:DR**
way more oil has been flowing through the strait since “day one” than the news and the AIS tracking system would have us believe. imo, the could cut the impending supply shock” substantially but wtf do i know?
analysts #3 has a big ‘ol set of balls.
**shits behind a paywall so you can only see about a third of the full article, credit to @aakashgupta on twitter for the following summary (that is clearly written my by our lord and savior chatgpt).**
Citrini sent a dude with $15,000 cash, recording sunglasses, and a pack of Cuban cigars to the Strait of Hormuz. What he found flips everything Wall Street thinks about the strait on its head.
Every hedge fund, every macro desk, every retired general on CNBC is watching the same AIS shipping data to price Hormuz risk. The analyst signed a pledge at an Omani checkpoint promising not to gather information, then smuggled in a gimbal, a microphone kit, and a 150x zoom Leica camera past the border officer who inspected his bag.
What he discovered on the ground: the AIS data everyone is trading on is missing roughly half of what's actually transiting the strait on any given day. Ships are going dark, spoofing destinations, broadcasting "CHINESE CREW OWNER" through transponder fields to avoid getting hit. Iran's ghost fleet is running 29+ laden tankers inside the Gulf with transponders off, moving an estimated $3B in crude to Malaysia since the war started.
The entire market is pricing a "closed" strait off satellite imagery and transponder data that has a 50% blind spot. Every oil model, every supply forecast, every macro call built on AIS throughput numbers is working from a dataset that systematically overstates the disruption.
When the signals deliberately go dark, the people staring at dashboards are the last to know what's happening. Citrini figured that out by putting a guy on a speedboat 18 miles from the Iranian coast while Shahed drones flew overhead.
The gap between "what AIS says" and "what's actually transiting" is the most mispriced variable in energy right now.