WTI has fallen for four straight sessions as Washington signals openness to talks with Iran at the UN General Assembly. The tanker war that sent oil toward 100 dollars has not ended, but the market is now pricing a chance that it might.

Trump says the Iran war may be nearing an end even as a new front opens between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis, with a damaged pipeline threatening 4 percent of global oil supply. For Canadian portfolios, the mechanism runs in two directions at once.

Tanker traffic through the corridor has collapsed to a fraction of its usual volume since fighting between US and Iranian forces resumed, and the market has already priced in most of the disruption without a full shutdown.

WTI crude near $105 a barrel is no longer only a Market Desk story. It is a direct input into a Federal Reserve decision markets call almost certain, and Canadian energy exposure is the main channel back to portfolios.

The Saudi East-West pipeline was Riyadh's answer to the Hormuz closure, a 4 to 5 million barrel-a-day route to the Red Sea that did not need the Strait at all. Drone strikes shut it down September 10 and 11. The mechanism from there to Canadian portfolios is direct and already visible.

The CBOE Volatility Index spiked after the Saudi pipeline strike and retreated within a single session, even as WTI crude kept climbing. The anchoring effect behind that gap is worth naming before the next escalation arrives.

A weekend tanker strike and a damaged Saudi pipeline pushed WTI toward $103, but stocks, gold and the Canadian dollar all moved the other way, pointing to Wednesday''s Fed decision as the real driver.

WTI crude closed at $102.55 on September 13, the day an Iranian vessel was struck near Qeshm, and the chain from the Strait of Hormuz to Canadian portfolios runs through gasoline prices, energy equities, and the currency.

The oil-driven CPI shock and the TSX afternoon rebound on Friday are not two separate stories. They are the same number, working in opposite directions inside one trading session, while the Bank of Canada arrives at the identical conclusion through its own tariff-driven channel.

WTI crude closed at $102.48 on September 10, up 25 per cent since mid-August, as U.S. strikes on Iranian tankers and Iranian retaliation against ships using unauthorized routes have cut Hormuz traffic by more than a third.

WTI has surged since the U.S. and Iran began trading strikes on tankers in the Persian Gulf. The currency that usually tracks Canadian energy windfalls closely has barely moved, and that gap is the real portfolio question.

Tuesday's retaliatory tariffs, not the widening Iran conflict, finally moved the yield that Fed dovishness and a historic jobs miss could not.

WTI has risen 15% since August 10, most of it in the two sessions since Iran's attack on a Saudi tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. The mechanism connecting that to Canadian portfolios runs through the currency as much as the energy sector.

Iran's strikes near Kuwait have pushed Brent from under $89 to above $95 in three weeks, and the mechanism connecting that move to Canadian portfolios runs directly through the TSX energy sub-index, not around it.

China alone is now taking more than 200,000 barrels a day of Canadian crude as Gulf supply risk mounts, and Trans Mountain has nowhere left to put the rest of the demand it is attracting.

A hawkish hold moved the loonie by six hundredths of a cent. Gold, silver and the TSX miners moved on something else entirely: a second wave of US strikes on Iran and Iranian retaliation across the region.