Event guides
Events relevant to market context
A strait disruption, a canal restriction or a quota change can be relevant to market context. Each guide explains the event, the available historical context and the sectors it may affect, with evidence for and against.
Maritime chokepoints
Strait of Hormuz
About a fifth of the world's oil through a 21-mile channel. Whether it can actually be closed, and why disruption matters more than closure.
Suez Canal
Roughly a third of global container traffic. What the Ever Given proved, and why Suez transmits through freight rather than fuel.
Red Sea & Bab el-Mandeb
The corridor that feeds Suez — and the clearest modern case of a chokepoint disrupted without ever being closed.
Panama Canal
A major chokepoint with a rainfall and lake-level constraint. How water levels can become transit caps and affect connected routes.
Taiwan Strait
The semiconductor chokepoint — and the one where the exposed sector is technology rather than energy or freight.
Strait of Malacca
A heavily used chokepoint, 1.7 miles at its narrowest, and the route-risk context often described as the "Malacca dilemma".
Bosphorus & Turkish Straits
The grain chokepoint, running through central Istanbul under a 1936 convention that still governs who may pass.