FTSE 100 today: Stocks slip as Hormuz attacks temper Iran ceasefire hopes

The market is still pricing the geopolitical tape as a headline risk, but the second-order earnings shock is in freight, insurance, and fuel pass-through, not just spot crude. If Strait of Hormuz disruption persists even briefly, airlines, parcel/logistics, European chemicals, and any distributor with low inventory turns will see margin compression before energy producers get fully recognized in estimates; the fastest way to express that is through relative-value, not outright commodity longs. Gold’s bid is telling you the market is buying both tail-risk and policy-error hedges, which usually means real assets can stay supported even if crude retraces.

For the UK, the macro mix is subtly bearish duration: better labor data reduces the urgency for near-term easing, while the energy-bill tax change looks more like fiscal optics than a clean growth impulse. That combination tends to help cash-generative defensives and quality compounders, but it is toxic for rate-sensitive domestic cyclicals and for gilts if the market starts questioning budget discipline. The immediate reaction may be noisy, but over 1-3 months the front end is more likely to reprice fewer cuts than the equity market is currently discounting.

Compass is the cleaner fundamental long among the named names because labor resilience supports outsourced services demand and pricing confidence, while Mitie is a deal story rather than a clean operating thesis. The contrarian miss is that investors may be underestimating how quickly a temporary shipping scare can become a Q3 margin event, but overestimating how long a ceasefire premium lasts if diplomacy actually sticks. That makes the risk/reward asymmetric: chase protection on pullbacks, not after the first spike.