What We Got Wrong: What We Got Wrong, Week of July 14–17, 2026

What We Got Wrong, Week of July 14–17, 2026 The TTF call was the clearest miss. European gas consensus has been running bearish for weeks, and we haven't pushed back on it hard enough. Sixteen signals leaning bearish, double the bullish weight, that framing implied a settled view. Then TTF front-month surged 4.91% to €57.51/MWh on Friday, driven by Houthi escalation risk and a NAO flip. We flagged the bearish consensus accurately but didn't do enough to stress-test it against the tail risks building in the background. The mechanics were there, Bab el-Mandeb, the Iran-Houthi directive, the thin Hormuz buffer, but the editorial framing lagged the market's actual anxiety. The Hormuz buffer point deserved more prominence earlier in the week. BMI's Wednesday note said plainly that the physical market is more exposed to disruption now than it was in February, because the inventory cushion has been drawn down. We ran that on Thursday. A sharper version of that argument probably warranted space on Monday, when we were still leaning on the idea that Hormuz risk was "in the price." China was well-covered but unevenly timed. The Rystad demand revision and the import collapse data were both strong stories. The problem is we ran them consecutively on Friday evening, which made them feel like a recap rather than a developing read. The China throughput cut to multiyear lows was flagged in the April data, there was a longer lead time to work with there. On the RTE settlement story: we got the facts right, but the piece stayed close to the Montel wire rather than exploring what it means structurally. French day-ahead hitting €146.54/MWh is a significant data point. The settlement revision problem at RTE has been building since May. We reported it accurately but didn't connect the two clearly, a market where settlement data can be revised post-clearing is a market where day-ahead prices will carry a wider risk premium. That angle was in the material and we left it on the table. The ETS reform story was cut off in the source material, which meant our carbon coverage this week had a gap right at the most consequential moment, the Commission tabling changes that could affect allowance supply. Given that carbon represents a meaningful share of reader interest, that's an area where we should have been more complete. Where coverage was thinnest: US power and upstream infrastructure. The PJM bilateral contracts story was genuinely interesting, 13% project completion rate from the interconnection queue is a striking number, but it stood alone. No follow-through on what that means for capacity pricing into winter, or how the New York pipeline authorisation fits into the same Northeast supply-adequacy picture. Those two stories were published separately on the same evening and the connection between them wasn't made. The Cuba and India-Russia stories were solid. Nothing to walk back there. The week's main editorial drift was running bearish European gas framing into a Friday session that moved hard the other way. Not wrong to report the consensus, but the piece should have held more skepticism of it.