The glossary, in plain English
Finance has a dialect problem: half its vocabulary exists to make ordinary arithmetic sound like weather magic. Every term on the dashboard is defined below in regular English — what it is, and why anyone bothers to measure it. (Terms you might expect but won’t find — “backwardation,” say — aren’t here because the dashboard deliberately doesn’t use them.)
The terms
Strait Pressure
Is the strait itself in trouble?
Landfall’s 0–100 gauge of physical and regional stress: how many ships are actually moving, signs of conflict and GPS jamming, and how oil prices are reacting. High means the disruption itself is severe, whatever markets think about it.
Market Transmission
Has any of that reached your wallet?
The companion 0–100 gauge: financial-system stress, the VIX (see below), recession signals, and pump-price pass-through. It answers whether the shock has left the Middle East and started showing up in the wider economy.
Divergence (reality vs pricing)
The gap that makes this site worth checking.
The difference between what’s physically happening at the strait and what markets are pricing in. When reality runs ahead of pricing (or vice versa) for a sustained stretch, the dashboard flags it. Descriptive, not a trading signal.
Brent crude
The world’s oil price, more or less.
The benchmark price for seaborne oil, set in the North Sea and used to price most barrels traded internationally. When headlines say “oil rose,” they usually mean Brent.
WTI (West Texas Intermediate)
America’s hometown benchmark.
The U.S. oil benchmark, priced at a pipeline hub in Oklahoma. Usually trades a little below Brent because it’s landlocked.
Brent–WTI spread
A Middle-East fear gauge hiding in a subtraction.
Brent minus WTI. A Hormuz threat should hit seaborne barrels (Brent) harder than landlocked U.S. barrels (WTI), so a widening spread suggests the market sees a specifically Middle-Eastern problem — not just expensive oil generally.
VIX (“Market fear”)
Wall Street’s mood ring.
The Cboe Volatility Index — a measure, derived from options prices, of how much turbulence investors expect in U.S. stocks over the next month. High readings mean fear; low readings mean calm (or complacency, depending on who you ask). It’s the dashboard’s “Market fear” card.
Yield curve
The bond market’s weather vane.
The gap between 10-year and 2-year U.S. Treasury yields. When short-term rates rise above long-term ones (“inversion”), it has preceded most modern recessions — and the snap back through zero is often the sharper warning. Shown on the dashboard as context, not scored.
Days of supply (supply buffer)
The national pantry, measured in days.
U.S. commercial crude stockpiles divided by daily refinery use: how long inventories would last if not one more barrel arrived (also called “days of cover”). It is a measure of slack, not a countdown to empty — oil keeps arriving in the real world.
Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR)
The pantry behind the pantry.
The U.S. government’s emergency crude stockpile, stored in Gulf Coast salt caverns and released during supply shocks to cushion prices. Separate from commercial inventories; finite; slow to refill.
Sahm rule
The recession detector that’s embarrassingly simple.
A rule of thumb from economist Claudia Sahm: when the unemployment rate’s three-month average rises half a point off its recent low, a recession has usually already begun. Its track record is strong but not perfect — it flashed a false alarm in 2024, when unemployment rose because more people were job-hunting, not because of layoffs. Updates monthly with the jobs report.
Initial jobless claims
The Sahm rule’s impatient younger sibling.
How many people filed for unemployment benefits for the first time last week. The fastest broad read on layoffs — it reacts within weeks, while the unemployment rate takes months to turn.
Breakeven inflation
What the bond market thinks inflation will be, revealed by arithmetic.
The gap between regular and inflation-protected Treasury yields — the market’s own forecast of average inflation over the next five years. “Anchored” near 2% means investors read a price spike as temporary; a sustained climb past 3% would mean they don’t.
Financial stress index
Eighteen gauges duct-taped into one number.
The St. Louis Fed’s composite of interest rates, spreads, and volatility measures. Zero means average conditions; above zero means the financial system is tightening up. Below zero — where it has sat through most of this crisis — means conditions are looser than average.
GPS jamming
Electronic warfare you can see from an airliner.
Deliberate interference with satellite navigation, measured by how many aircraft near the strait report degraded accuracy. A side-effect proxy for military electronic activity — measured in the air, read as a hint about the water.
UKMTO
The number ships actually call.
United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations — the Royal Navy-run reporting centre that merchant ships radio when something happens in these waters. Its warnings (attacks, boardings, seizures) are the closest thing to official ground truth for maritime incidents.
Transit baseline
What “normal” means, computed honestly.
The pre-disruption norm for daily ship transits (roughly 95 a day through Hormuz, all vessel types), against which the current count is compared. Landfall computes it from healthy-period history so a long crisis can’t quietly redefine “normal” downward.
Keep reading
What happens if the strait closes · How much oil rides through Hormuz · How it reaches your wallet — or see the terms in action on the live dashboard.