Oil prices are tumbling on signs that traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is recovering.
A total of 14 oil tankers crossed the maritime chokepoint on Tuesday and 27 on Monday, according to ship-tracking firm Kpler. This marks a small uptick from 37 tanker transits over the weekend and a recovery from roughly 11 tankers a day the week before.
Brent futures are trading at around $73.8 a barrel, about $1.3 above the closing price of $72.5 a barrel on February 27, before the U.S.-Iran conflict started.
Roughly 6 to 7 million barrels of oil moved through the strait in recent days, according to ING, below prewar levels of 20 million barrels a day.
"We continue to believe that the oil sell-off is overdone, with the market still tightening. Clearly, price movements suggest the market expects a fairly rapid recovery in Persian Gulf oil supplies," the bank's strategists wrote in a note today.
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