The TSX Composite closed nearly unchanged Thursday even as banks fell and gold miners rallied sharply, with today's session set to turn on whether the US and Canada finalize a trade deal before tonight's tariff deadline.

The U.S. Treasury's debt buyback briefly eased global yields and lifted gold on Wednesday, but Canada's own 10 year yield climbed to a fresh high Thursday regardless, and gold's pullback on a fresh Iran escalation shows the week's rally was a rates trade, not a war trade.

Daily crossings through the Strait of Hormuz fell from 19 to 3 over the past week as President Trump threatened to bomb Oman, the neutral party brokering a shipping deal, introducing a new failure mode for the crisis.

A vessel struck overnight, Iran's language just got sharper, and Trump has widened the threat to a third country. Oil is up, but nowhere near March's peak. That gap is the story.

Monday's decline was 0.17%. The instinct it triggers in clients sitting on a year of record gains is not nearly so small.

The interim ceasefire and the sanctioned toll authority's 60-day waiver both lapse today, and neither expiry resolves how oil is actually still moving through the strait.

Trump and Iran's foreign minister traded accusations over control of the strait, but the price move came from the IEA and OPEC's demand forecasts, not the conflict itself.

Brent snapped a six session rally Thursday, not because anything resolved in the Strait of Hormuz, but because a genuine forecasting split between the world's two largest energy bodies finally showed up in price.

A CENTCOM missile strike, a deadly Houthi attack in the Red Sea, and a Trump demand for war reparations are running on one track this week. Advanced talks to reopen the Strait of Hormuz are running on another. Oil is pricing both at once.

A tanker attack, a Saudi refinery strike and dueling preconditions have Brent near a five-week high, right as the Bank of Canada heads into its September decision.

WTI and Brent jumped roughly 4 percent as Washington and Tehran each pointed to the naval blockade as the actual obstacle, a sharper claim than either side has made in weeks. Gold barely moved and the Canadian dollar stayed flat, leaving the loonie without the lift its own yield advantage and oil's rally would normally provide.

Last week's oil selloff assumed a Hormuz deal was close. Iran's weekend preconditions confirm it is not, and the chain runs straight back to the Bank of Canada's inflation math.

Friday's gold and oil decoupling was real. Assuming it holds without the Hormuz deal actually closing is the availability heuristic at work.

The reported Iran-Oman shipping agreement faces three separate approval points before it changes anything for Canadian energy portfolios, and this week's gold rally was driven by something else entirely.

WTI's whipsaw between Hormuz deal headlines and tanker incident headlines is the availability heuristic playing out in real time, and it is not settling anything for clients trying to read the trend.

Markets have priced steady de-escalation. A nearly identical arrangement collapsed three weeks ago, and Wednesday brought both a Houthi tanker attack and an Iranian statement that the strait stays closed until the US ends its blockade.