Oil jumped 5 percent. Gold exposed an underspecified marker. Stocks barely moved.

Front-month Brent settled about 5 percent higher on Monday after Iran hardened its conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and Houthi forces claimed a strike on a Saudi refinery. Gold closed above $4,400 on one widely used price feed and below it on another. And by our reading of the fed funds futures, a September rate hike moved from a coin flip to a clear majority. The stock market watched all of it and finished flat.

The through-line of the day is thresholds crossed by less than the uncertainty around their measurement. Gold finished $2.46 above our $4,400 line on one feed; a second feed's version of the same close came in $12.22 lower and never touched $4,400 at any point. The long end of the oil curve crossed its own line at Monday's settlement and moved back below it in Tuesday's premarket. A gap that size between two versions of one close is a measurement problem before it is a signal, and we treated it as one: the rule got fixed, and the signal got held.

One honest caveat before the paywall. Monday's oil move was front-led, a shape more consistent with war and immediate supply risk than with a broad demand repricing, and that contaminates what the long end of the curve can currently say about consumption. The cleanest reads on that question arrive on a calendar: one lands today, one tomorrow, and the decisive one on August 17.

A correction from yesterday's issue. Reading Monday's premarket, we wrote that gold slipping while the dollar firmed was consistent with the dollar-mechanical channel, the competing read against hard-asset reflation. The close reversed the read: gold finished the session up 1.35 percent from Friday's close at $4,402.46, with the dollar also up on the day. Our premarket crude figure aged just as badly, in the same direction: the morning's $84.83 became an $87.72 settlement, $2.89 higher. The lesson is about method rather than gold. A premarket reading cannot carry a channel attribution, and from this issue forward we will not hang one on it.

For paying subscribers below: the full regime dashboard, data, and mapped sources. Inside: the $12.22 disagreement between two versions of gold's close, and the named benchmark that now scores the marker; the ten-cent crossing on the oil curve's long end, and why the price test and the demand question stay separate; our settlement-implied estimate of the Fed's September step, up more than eight points in one session, and the print that would confirm or break it; and a second straight session where yen weakness outran the broad dollar move.