The ladder
When a shipping route closes, nothing in the news tells you whether it reopens next week or stays shut for a year. A market can put a price on that question, and through the 2026 Strait of Hormuz disruption one did. Polymarket ran the same contract at a ladder of deadlines, each asking whether traffic returns to normal by a given date. Seven of them carried prices across our window.
On June 16 the market still gave traffic a 90.5% chance of returning to normal by year-end, and 57.5%, which rounds to 58, by July 31. Over the following five weeks those odds came apart from the near end. The nearest four deadlines, June 15, end of June, July 7 and July 15, each fell to the 0.1% floor, and they did so in deadline order. By the final tick on July 22 the July 31 contract sat at 1.25%, August 31 at 13.5%, and December 31 at 53.5%, still roughly a coin flip.
A price can return to where it started. A passed deadline cannot.
The Hormuz Reconstruction · Vera Research
