What We Got Wrong: What We Got Wrong, Week of June 30 to July 3, 2026

What We Got Wrong, Week of June 30 to July 3, 2026 The biggest editorial failure this week was publishing the Citi $60 Brent call and the TTF +7% story as though they were separate market events. They weren't. They're the same underlying thesis, the Hormuz war premium unwinding, playing out differently across crude and gas, and we left readers to work out why oil is heading lower while European gas is heading sharply higher. That's not a nuanced read, it's a gap. The short version: the Hormuz closure rerouted LNG flows, and that rerouting hasn't reversed just because Iran issued a diplomatic statement. Crude oil was always going to price in some normalization once physical tanker traffic started moving again. Gas was always going to stay tight for longer because the LNG supply chain takes months to re-establish, not days. We had the component pieces but never pulled them together. The result looked inconsistent. On PJM: we covered Thursday's near-record demand day well, the 163 GW actual, the reserve margins, the gap between the 166 GW forecast and the outcome. What we didn't follow up on was why the forecast was off. PJM projected Thursday could break the 2006 record and it missed by more than 2 GW. That discrepancy matters, either the forecast was aggressive or the system had more demand response than expected. Worth a harder look next week rather than treating the near-miss as the story. The distillate piece had an honest but underplayed finding: the 2.5 million barrel build in ULSD is the number ULSD bears are trading on, but inventories are still 8% below the five-year seasonal average. We framed it as "signals consensus points strongly bearish" then buried the structural deficit in the second paragraph. That's backwards. The structural picture should have led. Coverage was thin on the China coal article. The five-year plan framing gave us a clean headline, but we didn't put it against any near-term market data. What is Chinese domestic coal trading at right now? What is the capacity utilisation rate of the plants they're protecting? The article had the policy story but not the numbers that would tell a trader whether the policy is doing real work or just signalling. Japan's coal article in the list was cut short, we may have published something incomplete, or a generation job didn't finish cleanly. Worth checking the live site. One smaller thing: the Citi article datestamped the forecast as Friday July 4, which is a Saturday and a US holiday. Small, but that kind of error in financial dates erodes credibility faster than it should. The week's Hormuz coverage was thorough in volume and thin in synthesis. We published seven or eight pieces touching the closure, but no single article took stock of where the cumulative trade and supply-chain picture stands entering Q3. That's probably the piece we should have written on Friday instead of another Hormuz angle.