While the world’s top oil traders parsed satellite images and Pentagon briefings for clues about the fate of the Strait of Hormuz, a small Manhattan research firm came up with the idea to just go there on a speedboat.
Citrini Research, the boutique firm that rattled AI investors with a bearish call earlier this year, says it packed a Pelican case with $15,000 in cash, a high-zoom Xiaomi phone, a gimbal, a microphone kit, and a roll of tobacco-free nicotine pouches Zyn, and dispatched an analyst to the most consequential chokepoint in global energy markets.
About 20% of the world’s oil and 25% of its liquefied natural gas pass through the 54-mile passage between Iran and Oman.
“Nobody — literally nobody, not the analysts, not the correspondents, not the retired generals doing hits on cable news” knew what was actually happening, Citrini wrote. Everyone, it said, was working from “the same stale satellite imagery and the same unnamed Pentagon sources.”
Into The Strait
The analyst, whom the firm calls only “Analyst #3” to avoid identification, crossed into Oman’s Musandam Peninsula — the rocky finger of land that juts into the strait from the south.
Against …
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