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...