Iran Allows Iraqi Ships To Use Strait Of Hormuz As Total Weekly Transits Reach Highest Since War Began Over the past two weeks we have been chronicling the increased rate of crossing across the "blockaded" strait of Hormuz as a growing number of ships from friendly nations - whether untolled Chinese tankers or toll-paying Indian, Japanese and Korean vessels - have been making the passage. And as t...
Iran Allows Iraqi Ships To Use Strait Of Hormuz As Total Weekly Transits Reach Highest Since War Began Over the past two weeks we have been chronicling the increased rate of crossing across the "blockaded" strait of Hormuz as a growing number of ships from friendly nations - whether untolled Chinese tankers or toll-paying Indian, Japanese and Korean vessels - have been making the passage. And as traffic through the Hormuz strait has been picking up in the past week, the seven-day rolling average for transits on Friday reached the highest since the war started, according to Bloomberg. More vessels are crossing, including those with no clear links to Iran or China, as nations negotiate with Tehran to get their ships through. Transits over the past day were led by liquefied petroleum gas carriers, including one headed to India and others with Iranian affiliations. Per Bloomberg calculations, a total of 13 ships have crossed since Friday morning, with 10 exiting the Persian Gulf and three entering from the open seas, according to vessel-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. To be sure, that’s still a trickle compared with the numbers before the war began on Feb. 28: in normal times, about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes through the strait every day. Recent crossings included a French container ship and a Japanese-owned LNG tanker, seemingly the first such transits since the war began. It’s not clear whether those journeys were a result of diplomatic outreach or negotiations by shipping companies and their intermediaries. Outbound traffic included five bulk carriers and one oil-product tanker joined the four LPG tankers in exiting the Persian Gulf since Friday morning. Three of the bulkers and the fuel tanker sailed on Saturday morning. Apart from the Indian LPG vessel, the others are linked to Chinese or Iranian interests. On the inbound side, two LPG carriers and one fuel tanker with Iranian affiliations were among the inbound transits record...
Thapana Onphalai/iStock via Getty Images Market Recap It's a good thing that March is finally over as it was not a kind month for equities unless you were heavily allocated to the Energy sector. The SPDR® S&P 500 ETF Trust ( SPY ) fell by 4.93% last month and is now down 4.36% year-to-date. The sour performance extended to safer corners of the market as well with the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ET...
Thapana Onphalai/iStock via Getty Images Market Recap It's a good thing that March is finally over as it was not a kind month for equities unless you were heavily allocated to the Energy sector. The SPDR® S&P 500 ETF Trust ( SPY ) fell by 4.93% last month and is now down 4.36% year-to-date. The sour performance extended to safer corners of the market as well with the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF ( SCHD ) declining by 2.62% and slowing down its strong momentum in 2026. Albeit, despite this setback, SCHD is still up 12.79% on the year, and enjoying a very healthy lead over SPY. Regardless which way the market moves investors shouldn't dwell on what already happened but instead look to the future. As such I ran my monthly stock screening process looking for opportune dividend stocks to consider in the current month. The main objective for this stock screening process is to have it present me with potentially opportune investment ideas to consider for further review. And whenever the market sees a strong decline as it did in March, I typically find more opportunities. I prefer for these opportunities to also offer a reasonable starting dividend yield and to have the potential to deliver a double digit total return in the long-run. In past editions of this monthly series I meticulously tracked performance, but over time this became very burdensome. In the past few updates I spent more time retrieving and analyzing individual stock returns than I did putting the list of ideas together. Going forward I will not track and update the performance every month, instead I will repurpose my efforts to find and present more opportunities. Starting this month the Top 10 High Yield list is being expanded to the Top 25 High Yield list. I will still share performance updates but they will be less frequent and compiled in a more efficient manner. As stated earlier, the primary purpose of this list is to generate investment ideas for further review. My selection process focuses on id...
In Charts: US Does Not Rely On Strait Of Hormuz Oil While Asia Stands To Lose Authored by Sylvia Xu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), The Strait of Hormuz has been called the jugular vein of the world’s oil supply, and as Operation Epic Fury continues, Iran continues to have a chokehold on the critical supply route. About one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas is typically shipped through the nar...
In Charts: US Does Not Rely On Strait Of Hormuz Oil While Asia Stands To Lose Authored by Sylvia Xu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), The Strait of Hormuz has been called the jugular vein of the world’s oil supply, and as Operation Epic Fury continues, Iran continues to have a chokehold on the critical supply route. About one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas is typically shipped through the narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea. But Iran’s attacks on commercial vessels have brought traffic through the strait to a virtual standstill since the start of the conflict on Feb. 28. In March, just 220 vessels transited the strait, according to data from maritime analytics platform Marine Traffic. Prior to the war, thousands of ships traversed the waterway each month. These actions have caused oil and gas prices to surge. Brent, a global benchmark for oil prices, has risen firmly above $100 a barrel overseas. The average gas price in the United States has surged past $4 per gallon. President Donald Trump has threatened to launch strikes on Iran’s oil wells, power plants, and critical oil infrastructure on Kharg Island unless the strait is reopened. He delayed the strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure until April 6, pending talks with the regime. Here’s a look at how much oil travels through the Strait of Hormuz and where it goes. An average of 20 million barrels of oil and refined products flowed through the narrow gateway between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran each day in 2025. That’s roughly 25 percent of the world’s sea-borne oil trade, according to a February analysis from the International Energy Agency. The strait is only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, with shipping lanes just two miles wide in each direction. The vast majority of crude oil and condensate—a natural gas byproduct—went to Asia (91 percent), according to a U.S. Energy Information Administration analysis based on Vortexa tanker-tracking data from the first half of 2025...
Hong Kong’s first five-year plan is expected to guide the city’s future development. Never before has the city attempted a comprehensive plan in the style of mainland China, signalling a major shift in how it approaches long‑term growth. The real question is not why a laissez‑faire economy must adopt a new model but how this transformation will unfold. This exercise is unprecedented on multiple fr...
Hong Kong’s first five-year plan is expected to guide the city’s future development. Never before has the city attempted a comprehensive plan in the style of mainland China, signalling a major shift in how it approaches long‑term growth. The real question is not why a laissez‑faire economy must adopt a new model but how this transformation will unfold. This exercise is unprecedented on multiple fronts. First, it departs from Hong Kong’s long-standing reliance on market forces and incremental...