Brent jumped 5 percent. The demand signal is still unreadable.

The US market has not opened as this issue goes out, so Monday's information belongs to Asia, Europe, and the energy complex. Brent has risen more than 5 percent in a week under Iran and Hormuz pressure, and this morning it did something less dramatic and more awkward. It traded on both sides of Friday's close, first below it, then above. The day's meaning turns on that wobble.

Overnight was supposed to bring the arbiter for our oil-demand thesis: Beijing's official July refinery figures. The window passed without a verifiable number reaching us. What repeated searches return instead is a clean-looking recovery figure, throughput up nearly 9 percent from a year earlier, and it carries a 2025 dateline. It describes last July. Had the year gone unchecked, this map would have reported a demand recovery on twelve-month-old data. It stays out, and the check moves to tomorrow.

One caveat, and it is the day's through-line. Our demand test fires only when oil's back end holds up while the front is soft, and a front that printed both directions in one morning can be called neither soft nor firm. In plain English: geopolitics is still moving near-term oil more clearly than consumption is moving long-dated oil, so neither the bullish supply story nor the weak-demand story received a clean confirmation today. That does not mean the demand thesis survived. It means the market did not produce a valid test. Tomorrow's settlements can begin one; two in a row would finish it. Until then the map records the week's war premium and scores nothing.

For paying subscribers below: Japan's 10-year yield is now 0.07 points from our stress line; Brent's demand test has been tightened after an invalid intraday read; and a year-old China refinery number nearly triggered a false regime change. Plus the full dashboard, mapped sources, next observables, and exact conditions that would prove each lane wrong.