Is The Iran blockade working better than the stock market thinks?

There is a lot of noise right now about ships "slipping past" the US blockade on Iran. Social media loves that narrative. Makes for good headlines.

The actual shipping data tells a different story.

37 vessels redirected so far. Iranian tankers getting herded back into Chabahar like cattle. Eight sanctioned tankers kettled in the Gulf of Oman, unable to get past the blockade line. The US is boarding stateless and falsely flagged vessels with full legal cover — same playbook they used on Venezuelan tankers last year. One Iranian ship, the Tusca, got warning shots across the bow, then solid rounds into the engine room. That was the example. The rest are getting turned around quietly.

Here is the part that actually matters: Iran is pulling a 30-year-old dead tanker out of retirement just for floating storage. Why? Because if they run out of places to put crude, they have to cap wells. And when you cap a well, you damage it. The pressure keeps building and you cannot just turn it back on when you feel like it. That is real economic leverage. That is what the blockade is designed to do.

Meanwhile, off the east coast of Malaysia, 80+ ghost fleet tankers are sitting in an anchorage doing ship-to-ship transfers. Windward AI is tracking 766 deep-draft vessels in the Gulf. Tanker Trackers is identifying individual ships from satellite imagery of their deck layouts — like fingerprints. The tracking is granular and it is relentless.

Is the blockade perfect? No. Ships are still loading at Kharg Island. Six million barrels across three tankers just yesterday. But perfect is not the standard. The standard is whether it squeezes Iran hard enough to force them back to the negotiating table. The well pressure problem and nine tankers parked in Chabahar with nowhere to go suggest it is getting there.

The stock market is pricing in a quick diplomatic deal. The people tracking actual ships are looking at a very different picture.

Source: "Is the US Blockade Against Iran Really Working?" — (YouTube: What's Going on With Shipping?)