Only five ships pass through Strait of Hormuz in 24 hours By Reuters

The market is still treating this as a transport headline, but the real transmission channel is energy availability plus working-capital stress. When routing becomes constrained, the first-order hit is not just lost voyages; it is inventory dislocation, higher insurance, and forced use of longer, lower-throughput corridors that raise effective freight rates across adjacent lanes. That tends to reward balance-sheet strength in global logistics while punishing operators with high spot exposure, weak charter coverage, or Middle East-linked revenue concentration.

Second-order effects are more important for industrials and semis than for the obvious energy complex. If the Gulf remains partially inaccessible for weeks, refined product and petrochemical feedstocks become more expensive and less reliable, which can ripple into packaging, auto, and electronics supply chains via resin, specialty gas, and shipping delays. For NVDA and INTC specifically, the article is not a direct earnings driver, but a sustained risk-off tape plus any inflation impulse that keeps rates higher for longer is mechanically negative for long-duration multiple expansion, with INTC more exposed if enterprise capex gets deferred and cloud customers prioritize resilience over expansion.

The key catalyst window is days-to-weeks, not quarters: every additional day of restricted passage keeps war-risk premiums embedded and raises the probability that shippers preemptively reroute even if the strait remains technically open. The contrarian angle is that an eventual de-escalation could trigger a sharp snapback in freight and energy risk premia, so chasing the move in broad shipping or oil equities after a few more sessions of tension may have poor asymmetry unless the blockade expands materially. The better expression is to own convexity around a regime shift, not assume a straight-line continuation of panic pricing.