Brent reclaimed $88. Our oil-demand thesis failed the price test we set for it.

Front-month Brent settled above our $88 line on Tuesday, a second consecutive advance, on a session that traded in both directions. The barrel sold off toward $87 as the market revisited reports that Iran-Oman talks over a partial reopening of the Strait of Hormuz had reached an advanced stage, then closed higher after a senior Iranian security official said the strait stays shut until Tehran's conditions are met. Nothing is signed, and as of this writing nothing has changed overnight.

The day's real event sits further back on the oil curve. Weeks ago we wrote down a test that would count against our China-led oil-demand-erosion thesis, and this week we hardened it to require persistence. Tuesday's settlement satisfied it exactly as written. The honest response is the uncomfortable one: the lane weakens, and we do not tighten the rule again. A test that gets harder every time it fires is a thesis defending itself.

One caveat before the wall. The figure that fired that test is the weakest number in this issue, a reconstruction from a single vendor's board rather than an exchange print. We fire the test anyway and register the doubt, because the alternative is a rule that only binds when convenient.

A correction to yesterday's issue. We reported gold's Monday close at $4,402.46 on Investing.com's spot series, $2.46 above our $4,400 line on that one feed. The vendor has since revised that row to $4,388.96, which is $13.50 lower, with a session high of $4,396.71. On the revised tape the session never touched $4,400 at any point. The same vendor also revised its silver and yen rows for the same session ($65.8345 became $65.7600; 159.16 became 159.31). Three revisions to one session from one source is a stability problem with the source. It is also why yesterday's benchmark change was the right call, on narrow grounds: the retired spot instrument has now demonstrated it was the noisier one. The COMEX contract our marker actually scores on settled $4,419.70 that same Monday and has since gone higher. The crossing we reported survives nowhere in its original form, and a threshold crossed by less than the vendor's own revision size was never a measurement.

For paying subscribers below: the full dashboard, calculations, and mapped sources. Inside: why the oil-demand lane weakened even though the move still looks war-driven; the August 17 China release that can test the mechanism; whether gold completes its new COMEX marker tonight; and why Japan's bond market is saying more than the yen.