What We Got Wrong — What We Got Wrong — Weekend Edition

What We Got Wrong The honest headline this week: we couldn't keep Brent straight. One piece led with crude settling at $94.40 at the end of May, down $16. Other pieces the same day put ICE Brent front-month near $86.80, $87.13 on Friday's close, with the title insisting prices were "holding near $87." Both can be true across different dates, but a reader scanning our front page got three numbers and no clean throughline. If you came away unsure where oil actually sat on Friday, that's on us, not you. The bigger lean was Hormuz, and there we platformed confidence we should have framed harder. We ran an Equinor trading manager calling a full reopening "certain," with flows resuming "tomorrow" — published hours after Iran announced a fresh blockade. We noted the awkwardness, but we still led with one optimistic voice on a market where a second closure in under two months argues the opposite. A single trader's read isn't a forecast, and we let it carry more weight than it earned. We also leaned on the same evidence over and over. Chris Wheaton's line that Europe imports roughly a quarter of its gas as LNG showed up in the Equinor piece, the ICIS piece, and others, each time as if it were fresh confirmation. It's a fine stat. It's also one analyst, cited repeatedly, which can read as consensus when it's really just one source doing a lot of work across the week. Our Hormuz timeline never fully cohered either. One piece dates the closure to February 28 and pegs the supply hit at more than 10 Bcf/d. Another describes a "second blockade in under two months." A third reports a fresh blockade announced June 11. Readers deserved one clear sequence — closed, reopened, re-closed — and we never assembled it in a single place. We told the story in fragments and assumed people would stitch it together. On gas, we leaned bearish on Henry Hub with some confidence: rising Lower-48 supply into flat summer power demand, Henry Hub at $3.12, MISO and ERCOT real-time pointing the same way. That call is defensible. But running it alongside a week of Hormuz disruption pieces, we never quite reconciled why the global LNG shock splitting US and European prices wouldn't eventually pull on US gas too. We treated the two stories as separate when they're plumbed together. China was our thinnest framing. We led with coal-fired power climbing for a fourth straight month and the import squeeze, which is real, then half-buried the structural counterpoint — that renewable capacity has already passed coal. The coal-up headline is the cyclical story; the capacity build is the durable one, and we gave the durable one a clause where it deserved a paragraph. Where we were genuinely thin: power markets. The AEMO home-battery piece and the PJM capacity backdrop got real reporting but less room than the oil and gas coverage that dominated. If you trade European or Australian power, this was a quieter week from us than it should have been. We'll even that out.