I want to tell you about a restaurant owner named Siddharth.
He runs a place in Bengaluru — India’s answer to Silicon Valley, a city of 13 million people where tech workers eat out twice a day and food delivery apps never stop pinging.
His kitchen burns through 10 to 12 gas cylinders every day.
Tandoori chicken, dal, biryani — the kind of food that built modern Indian cuisine.
Last Tuesday, Siddharth turned off his gas burners. Walked to the back of his kitchen. And lit a wood fire.
Not as a culinary experiment.
Not for some trendy “flame-roasted” menu item. Because he couldn’t find a single cooking gas cylinder anywhere in the city.
Across town, a biryani chain called Arsalan — an institution, the kind of place people argue about like New Yorkers argue about pizza — sent workers 30 kilometers outside the city to buy gas cylinders from black market dealers.
They paid double. They needed 70 per day across their 12 restaurants. In Lucknow, a famous Mughlai restaurant ripped out its entire menu and rebuilt it around coal. Cooking times doubled. Half the dishes disappeared.
By the end of the week, 10,000 restaurants in a single Indian state — Tamil Nadu — had closed.
I read that number three times.
Ten thousand restaurants. In one state. In one week.
Now here’s the part that made me set down my coffee and open a spreadsheet.
The reason these restaurants closed wasn’t a local gas shortage. It wasn’t a supply chain glitch. It wasn’t even an Indian problem.
It was a 21-mile-wide strip of water 3,400 kilometers away — the Strait of Hormuz — where, for the first time in modern history, commercial shipping had dropped to zero.
And when I started pulling the data on what that actually means — not for oil, which is what everyone’s talking about, but for everything else that flows through that strait — I found an investment thesis that almost nobody is framing correctly.
Let me show you what I mean.
First, Let Me Tell You What Happened
If you’ve been watching the news, you know the basics. On February 28th, the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Iran retaliated. The IRGC — Iran’s Revolutionary Guard — declared the Strait of Hormuz closed.
But the news coverage doesn’t capture what happened next. And this is the part that matters for us as investors.
Imagine you’re the captain of a 300,000-ton oil tanker. You’re sitting in the Persian Gulf, loaded with crude, waiting to transit the strait. Then you hear — on the international distress frequency, the channel reserved for emergencies — Iran broadcasting that the strait is closed and any vessel attempting passage will be targeted.
You look at your tracking screen. On February 28th, 50 tankers transited the strait. On March 1st and 2nd, the number was zero. Not reduced. Zero.
Then your insurance company calls. They’re pulling war risk coverage. Entirely. Not raising premiums — removing coverage. Without insurance, you can’t legally operate. No port in the world will accept your ship.
So you drop anchor. And you wait.
By March 10th, 984 tankers — roughly 22% of the global fleet — were stranded in the Middle East region. 750 vessels including 100 container ships were stuck. Six cruise ships with 15,000 passengers had nowhere to go. Maersk, the world’s biggest shipping company, suspended all Hormuz transits. So did MSC, CMA CGM, and Hapag-Lloyd — the other three giants of global shipping.
The most important waterway on Earth had effectively shut down.
Twenty percent of the world’s oil. Twenty percent of global LNG. Thirty percent of Europe’s diesel. Half of Europe’s jet fuel. Ninety percent of India’s cooking gas imports.
Gone.
Here’s Where Everyone Gets It Wrong
Now, here’s the narrative you’re hearing everywhere:
“Oil spiked because of Iran. When the war ends, oil normalizes. Buy crude, sell the rally.”
I hear this from analysts on TV. I see it in research notes. I read it in every investment forum.
And I think it’s one of the most expensive misunderstandings in markets right now.
Let me explain why.
Crude oil actually has a workaround. It’s messy, it’s partial, but it exists.
Saudi Arabia built a 1,200-kilometer pipeline across the Arabian desert in 1981 — during the Iran-Iraq War — specifically for this scenario. It runs from their eastern oil fields to a port called Yanbu on the Red Sea, completely bypassing Hormuz. When the crisis hit, Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser said they would push this pipeline to its emergency maximum: 7 million barrels per day. Within a week, Yanbu’s exports had surged 330% from pre-war levels.
The UAE has a similar pipeline adding another 1.5 million barrels per day.
Combined, these bypass routes can move roughly 4-5 million barrels per day to market. That doesn’t replace the 20 million that normally flow through Hormuz. But combined with the largest strategic reserve release in IEA history — 400 million barrels from 32 countries — it keeps crude oil flowing, even if painfully.
So yes, oil will be expensive. But it won’t disappear.
Now here’s the thing that stopped me cold.
There is no bypass for anything else.
There is no pipeline for natural gas. Qatar — which supplies 20% of the world’s LNG — declared force majeure on March 4th after Iranian drones struck its facilities. Its entire production — 77 million tonnes per year — vanished from global supply. Shell and TotalEnergies, who buy roughly 12 million tonnes of Qatari gas per year, couldn’t deliver to their customers either. The European gas benchmark spiked 40% in a single day. And EU gas storage? Already at 30% — the lowest since the dark days of 2022.
There is no pipeline for diesel or jet fuel. You can’t put refined products through a crude oil pipeline. Europe was importing 30% of its diesel and half its jet fuel from the Middle East. That supply is gone.
There is no pipeline for cooking gas. That’s why Siddharth is burning wood in Bengaluru.
There is no pipeline for iron ore or aluminum. 280 bulk carriers are stranded. Aluminum prices are spiking.
Everyone is watching the oil price. But the real crisis — the one with no workaround, no bypass, no strategic reserve to draw from — is happening in LNG, refined products, cooking gas, and industrial commodities.
And that crisis is where the investment opportunity lives.
Why This Isn’t a War Trade
Let me ask you something.
If the Strait of Hormuz reopened tomorrow — fully, completely, commercial traffic restored — would Japan stop worrying about the fact that 87% of its energy comes through a chokepoint a hostile nation just shut down in 48 hours?
Would South Korea — which gets 81% of its energy from the same route — go back to business as usual?
Would India — which just watched 10,000 restaurants close because a waterway on the other side of the continent went dark — keep importing 90% of its cooking gas through that same corridor?
No.
What’s coming is not a trade. It’s a structural rebuild.
Long-term supply agreements with US and Australian LNG exporters. Terminal and pipeline expansion across every alternative route. Strategic reserve expansion across Asia. Accelerated nuclear, renewables, and energy independence programs.
This is the exact pattern I identified in European defense spending eighteen months ago. Everyone said the defense spending surge was a “Ukraine trade.” I wrote that it was a 30-year structural deficit being corrected. That thesis delivered 40-200% returns on the companies I identified.
The energy infrastructure thesis follows the same logic. The same timeline. And potentially even larger dollar amounts.
The question isn’t whether countries will spend hundreds of billions to diversify away from Hormuz dependency. They will. It’s already starting.
The question is: which companies capture that spending?
I’ve spent the last two weeks answering that question.
What’s Behind the Paywall
For premium subscribers, I’m sharing the complete Hormuz energy infrastructure thesis — the most comprehensive analysis I’ve published since the defense supercycle edition.
Here’s what you get:
✅ 7 specific tickers I’m buying right now — including a US midstream operator at 8.2x forward earnings with a 6.8% dividend and direct exposure to the LNG export surge that’s just starting (exact entry zones, position sizes, and 24-month price targets for each)
✅ The “Yanbu Trade” — the company that benefits directly from Saudi Arabia’s emergency expansion of Red Sea export capacity, up 11% since the crisis began with 45-60% more upside in my model
✅ The complete bypass infrastructure map — every alternative route, pipeline, and terminal, with the 4 companies positioned at the critical bottlenecks where expansion money flows first
✅ The LNG contract calendar — exact timing windows for when Japanese, Korean, and European utilities finalize emergency long-term supply agreements with US exporters, and how to position before announcement
✅ The “India Cooking Gas Trade” — the most asymmetric, most overlooked position in this entire crisis. Nobody is talking about this, and the government is restructuring $3.25 billion in annual subsidies around new supply chains right now
✅ 3 kill scenarios and 2 hedge positions — what breaks this thesis and how I’m protecting against it
✅ The same procurement methodology I used for European defense — now applied to energy infrastructure emergency orders being placed by Asian governments this month
A note on pricing: Macro Notes subscription prices evolve periodically as our research coverage expands and the subscriber base grows. If you subscribe today, your rate locks in permanently — it won’t increase for you, even when we raise prices for new subscribers in the future.
I moved capital into this thesis last week. Eighteen months ago, when I published the defense supercycle analysis, people told me I was too early. Three months later, Goldman Sachs published a 50-page report on the same theme.
I don’t think I’ll be early on this one for very long.
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