There's a stretch of water between Iran and Oman that's only 21 miles wide. |
For context, that's shorter than most people's morning commute. |
And right now, that 21-mile gap, the Strait of Hormuz, is effectively closed for business. |
And while it's not a formal blockade, it's something far more practical and effective… the promise of missiles, drones, and insurance premiums so high that no sane ship captain will make the crossing. |
Here's what most people don't understand about this moment: the Strait of Hormuz isn't just an oil chokepoint. Sure, that's the headline mainstream media is highlighting and what cable news will tell you. |
But underneath the oil story is something far more dangerous. A supply-chain catastrophe that touches everything from the fertilizer on American farms to the fluid that keeps every heavy-duty truck in this country running. |
I don't really talk politics, and this isn't some geopolitical abstraction. This is the price of bread in six weeks. The price of eggs in three months. The price of chicken by fall. |
And the talking heads really aren't describing what you're about to discover. |
The System Was Built on a Promise That Just Broke |
I grew up in a household where nothing was guaranteed. We're a first-generation, lower-middle-class American family. We didn't have a "safety net". We had each other and whatever my parents could scrape together that week. |
That experience burned something into me early… never depend on a single source for anything that matters. |
I'm sure you were raised the same way, but… |
The global economy didn't get that memo. |
For decades, the world optimized for efficiency, just-in-time delivery, lean inventories, and single-source dependencies. |
The whole system is built on one assumption: that the shipping lanes would always be open, the tankers would always flow, and nobody would ever be crazy enough to shut down the most important waterway on the planet. |
That assumption just died. |
Within 30 months, three of the world's five most critical maritime chokepoints, the Suez Canal, the Bab el-Mandeb strait, and now the Strait of Hormuz, have faced severe disruption. |
Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, suspended all trans-Suez voyages indefinitely. Dry-bulk transits through the strait are down a staggering 91%. Two hundred and eighty bulk carriers sit trapped. |
The timing is brutal. |
The Northern Hemisphere's spring planting season is underway right now. Farmers need fertilizer. Roughly a third of the world's fertilizer exports just got locked behind a 21-mile kill zone. |
The Cascade Nobody's Talking About |
Let me walk you through what happens next because this is the part the mainstream financial media is either missing or deliberately ignoring. |
Fertilizer. The U.S. imported 28% of its urea fertilizer from the Middle East last year. The EU imports up to 45%. Australia imports at least 64%. Urea is the most commonly used nitrogen fertilizer on the planet, and half of all global food production depends on synthetic nitrogen. |
No fertilizer, less food. Less food, higher prices. Higher prices, civil unrest. We watched this exact sequence play out after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Now imagine it worse. The chokepoint is tighter. The alternatives are fewer. |
Sulphur. This is the one nobody's talking about, and it might be the most important. Between 44% and 50% of the world's sulphur trade transits through Hormuz. Sulphur is the feedstock for sulphuric acid. |
A $35 billion industry and a non-negotiable input for extracting copper, uranium, cobalt, nickel, and lithium. Without sulphuric acid, you can't mine the metals that build everything from EV batteries to missile guidance systems. |
Indonesian nickel producers, who depend on the Middle East for 75% of their sulphur, have already stopped offering long-term contracts. They have one to two months of supply left. |
Petrochemicals. The Middle East is the top exporter of polyethylene, with 84% of its output transiting through Hormuz. 80% of Asia's naphtha imports, crucial to petrochemicals, originate in the Middle East. |
When these feedstocks stop flowing, production halts across medical devices, automotive parts, construction materials, and consumer goods. |
Diesel exhaust fluid. This is where it gets personal for every American who buys groceries. Thirty-one percent of traded urea passes through Hormuz, and urea is essential for DEF, the fluid required by most U.S. heavy-duty trucks built since 2010. |
Without DEF, these engines are progressively derated to very low power and speed. They effectively stop working. Think about what that means for domestic freight. For grocery store shelves. For the last mile of every supply chain in America. |
One chokepoint, this one 21-mile stretch of water, and the entire global industrial machine starts grinding. |
As one leading geopolitical analyst put it: "What appears at first as a maritime blockade is in fact the exposure of the entire global system as a hierarchy of brittle interdependencies." |
That's a polite way of saying the world built a $100 trillion economy on the assumption that a 21-mile-wide strait would never close. |
What could possibly go wrong? |
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Why "Very Soon" Isn't Soon Enough |
President Trump said this week that the war with Iran will be over "very soon." The market believed him, oil dropped 20%, and stocks rallied on Monday. |
But ending a war isn't that simple. Especially when the other side has every incentive to keep fighting. |
Iran's new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, lost his mother, wife, sister, and brother-in-law, in the same U.S.-Israeli strike that killed his father. |
The hardline faction that elevated him to power believes the June ceasefire was a strategic mistake. One that allowed the U.S. and Israel to rearm and come back stronger. They're not making that mistake again. |
Iran's Parliament Speaker said this week that Iran is "definitely not looking for a ceasefire." |
The Foreign Minister said talking to the Americans is no longer on the agenda. Russia has publicly offered support. China is quietly calculating that an extended war further distracts America from Asia and deepens U.S. dependence on Chinese critical minerals. |
And here's the military reality nobody in Washington wants to say out loud: the U.S.-Israeli coalition burned through 3,000 precision-guided munitions in the first 36 hours. An incredible show of force, but… |
The new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs warned before the war started that stockpiles were inadequate. China controls the midstream supply chain for almost every mineral needed to build replacements. |
You can't surge production of the scientists, engineers, and metallurgists needed to rebuild what doesn't exist. This is the result of a decades-long institutional failure. |
An F-35 fighter jet costs $130 million to build. It cannot function without approximately $1,000 worth of the heavy rare-earth samarium, which China has restricted since April 2025. |
A $1.1 billion radar system destroyed by an Iranian missile last week contained $80,000 worth of gallium. Rebuilding it will take at least eight years and at a cost that may dwarf the original price tag. |
The asymmetry is staggering. And Tehran knows it. |
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What This Means for Your Money |
Here's the key takeaway, and I want you to truly understand this: |
The era of cheap, reliable, just-in-time global supply chains is over. Not temporarily disrupted. Over. |
The Strait of Hormuz crisis is the exclamation point on a sentence that's been writing itself since COVID emptied warehouses in 2020 and Russia weaponized energy in 2022. |
I don't do politics in this newsletter. Never have, never will. |
But politics and markets aren't separate worlds, and ignoring where they intersect doesn't make you objective. It makes you blind. |
Setting politics aside, here's a fact: the Trump administration identified America's supply-chain dependency as a national security threat before most of Wall Street took it seriously. |
The tariffs, the critical minerals executive orders, the push to reshore production — whether you love the approach or hate it, the underlying diagnosis was right. The world was too dependent on fragile, single-source supply chains running through contested chokepoints. A 21-mile strait just proved it. |
So what comes next is a massive, multi-year investment cycle to rebuild supply chains for resilience instead of efficiency. Reshoring. Stockpiling. Domestic production of everything from fertilizer to rare-earth minerals. |
We are witnessing a structural shift in how the global economy operates. |
The numbers already tell the story. A leading food security index, which tracks companies critical to feeding the world, including Western fertilizer suppliers like CF Industries, Nutrien, and Yara International, is up 22.3% year-to-date while the S&P 500 is down 0.8%. |
Gold is breaking out against every major stock index. Commodities have broken out versus U.S. Treasuries for the first time in years, a signal that inflation fears are real and rising. |
Meanwhile, oil prices are registering double-digit year-over-year gains. |
One major Wall Street firm estimates a $20 move in oil could translate into $150 billion in higher gasoline expenditures this year, more than wiping out the individual tax cuts from the OBBBA legislation. |
And the people who get hurt worst are the ones who can least afford it: lower-income households spending a larger share of their income on gas and food, working jobs that can't be done from home. |
Top-third household incomes are growing over 4% year-over-year. Bottom-third? 0.6%. |
That's not a wealth gap, it's a wealth canyon! |
This is stagflation setting up in real time. Rising prices. Slowing growth. |
A Fed that can't cut rates because oil is pushing inflation higher. And a government that will borrow more to fund defense, because nobody in Washington has the courage to cut spending or raise taxes. |
As one former European leader once said, "We all know what to do. We just don't know how to get re-elected after we've done it." |
All roads lead to hard assets. |
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The One Thing You Can Do Right Now |
You don't need to be a hedge fund manager to act on this. |
You need to do one thing… |
Start building exposure to the companies and commodities that benefit from supply-chain rebuilding and food security. |
Look at agricultural and fertilizer companies, the ones that will fill the gap as Gulf exports stay locked behind Hormuz. |
Look at critical mineral miners positioned outside of Chinese control. |
Look at gold and silver, which thrive in exactly this kind of environment: rising inflation, falling confidence in sovereign debt, and a dollar entering a long-term downtrend. |
Understand, I'm not trying to cause you to panic. But what I am trying to do is make you see the world clearly and position yourself before the crowd catches up. |
This is exactly what Moonshot Premium was built for. Over the coming weeks and months, the entire Moonshot Minute research machine will research specific names across fertilizer, critical minerals, precious metals, and food security — and deliver those recommendations directly to Premium Members. |
The portfolio is already positioned in several of these themes, and we're adding to it. If you've been reading these essays and thinking "okay, but what do I actually buy?", well, that's the gap Premium closes. |
I learned a long time ago, watching my parents navigate a world that offered them no safety net, that the people who survive aren't the ones who hope things go back to normal. |
They're the ones who build for what's coming. |
Twenty-one miles of water just told you what's coming. |
Act accordingly. |
— Double D |
P.S. The write-up on our next pick is live below for Premium Members only. The ticker, the thesis, my buy-up-to price, and a full breakdown of the risks, including the headline that just rattled the stock and the earnings report around the corner. Upgrade to Premium below. |
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P.S. #2 Here's a screenshot of the current Moonshot Minute Portfolio. I've blurred out the tickers since that information is only for Premium Members, but you can see how we've done so far: |
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