Every major index closed higher Wednesday on Hormuz de-escalation hopes, but gold's largest single-session gain of the week and oil's near-flat close tell a more cautious story than the record headlines do.

Tuesday's TSX rally and 6.36% WTI decline priced Hormuz optimism as though the strait were reopening. What Iranian, American, and Omani officials are actually describing is a temporary, Iran-administered corridor with a stated one-to-three-month shelf life, and the two sides do not agree on its terms.

Investors are pricing the latest Strait of Hormuz breakthrough as a first event. The 2026 record shows announced de-escalations in this conflict have a short and measurable half-life, and the research on base-rate neglect explains exactly why that record is not being used.

Trump called off what he described as the biggest strike on Iran since World War Two, then reissued an ultimatum within a day. The chain from that whiplash to Canadian portfolios runs through gasoline prices and the Bank of Canada's September 2 decision as much as through crude oil charts.

Crude has reversed sharply four times in the past month, each time on a headline that got priced as resolution and then was not. The pattern has a name, and it explains why Tuesday's rebound should not be read as an answer either.

A week spent showing Hormuz traffic recovering and the Bank of Canada holding steady ended with tanker strikes, a 19-year Treasury yield high, and a TSX decline that tracked neither.

On July 8, twenty-one days after the memorandum that defined June, the United States and Iran resumed open conflict. WTI round-tripped from a five-month low back above eighty-five dollars, Warsh's Fed sent long yields to a nineteen-year high, and the Strait of Hormuz closed the month at its worst traffic reading of the war.

The TSX, the S&P 500, oil and the Canadian dollar all finished higher Friday. Gold, the number both the Behavioural and Tax and Wealth Desks led with this morning, was the exception, and the vessel data the Geopolitical Desk cited as evidence of calm reversed just as fast.

Fourteen vessels crossed the strait Wednesday without a political settlement behind them. The gap between operational improvement and an actual deal is where the risk to Canadian energy portfolios is sitting right now.

The US paused strikes overnight and Iran and Oman are still nowhere near a deal on the strait. Two commodities read the same week two different ways.

Wednesday's diplomatic track, the one this desk flagged as the base case two sessions ago, did not survive the week. WTI's climb back above $85 is the market's first read on whether this round of escalation resolves like the last one or does not.

Every missile Iran fired at US forces overnight was shot down, a familiar outcome after five months of war. What changed was Saudi Arabia joining US strikes in Iraq, a shift from broker to combatant with a direct mechanism into Canadian energy portfolios.

WTI's slide to $81.04 marks a genuine, diplomacy-driven retreat from July's highs, not a fading headline. In the same stretch, the probability of a Fed hike tomorrow rose instead of falling, and a same-day strike claim on Saudi Arabia's Hormuz bypass pipeline shows the tail risk the market is discounting never actually left.

Houthi forces claimed a strike on Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline, the route built to move crude around the Strait of Hormuz entirely, the same day Oman proposed a formal Hormuz shipping mechanism. The base case still points to de-escalation, but the tail risk just moved to different infrastructure.

Houthi missiles struck two Aramco refining complexes Saturday, widening a war that had mostly stayed confined to Iran and its immediate coastline. Markets are pricing a different signal instead: a quiet pause between the United States and Iran that touches a far larger share of global oil supply.

Houthi missiles struck two Saudi Aramco refineries Saturday, the first direct hit on the kingdom's oil infrastructure in four years. The bigger price move came from something with no pictures at all: a quiet, unannounced pause in US strikes on Iran.