Maritime Markets

Real-time vessel traffic through the world's major maritime chokepoints.

The real story playing out in global markets is not any single crisis but the increasing frequency of supply chain shocks as the post-WWII international order fractures. Maritime chokepoints are not global public goods whose maintenance is guaranteed by cooperation. They are leverage points in a new multipolar contest. China and Russia consolidating power, Europe aging into irrelevance, the US scrambling to reassert dominance after ceding territory in foreign theaters. These dynamics, combined with protectionist economics and strategic trade decoupling, will play out first and foremost in maritime trade: who restricts which waters, where political instability leads to piracy and insurance premiums, how commodities get rerouted.

Markets are the right construction for this moment. When everyone is glued to livestreams of the Strait of Hormuz, what they are actually speculating on is chokepoint traffic. These markets let you trade that ground truth directly: ship counts by vessel class, metric kilotonnage of trade throughput, across the ports and straits that matter. Information guaranteed by liquidity is more valuable than information guaranteed by journalistic integrity. The biggest winners in the coming decades will be those willing to make directional bets on how global geopolitical storylines unfold. These markets exist to serve that.

Data is derived from AIS (Automatic Identification System) transponder signals, aggregated into 24-hour rolling windows to smooth short-term fluctuations, with the exception of the Strait of Hormuz markets, for which streaming data is not available and the index updates on the basis of 15-minute snapshots.