Good morning! It is a rather calm week compared to the last couple of weeks. The Strait of Hormuz situation remains stable so we focus on the midterms and the AI race. We had a very tense race in Colorado, while in AI we expect to see a bunch of new models this month.
Outside of that we also take a look at Maria Corina Machado as she had her couple of days in the news cycle after the Venezuela earthquake, where over 50,000 people are still unaccounted for after days of conducting rescue operations.
Let’s take a look at the markets to make sense out of the news!
The Midterms Tracker
RED
We had a slight bump in RED yesterday. It’s nothing major, but this time the index reflect a change in the SENR index.
Senate
Chances for a Republican control of the Senate after the midterms is rising. The SENR index rose 0.2 points as traders continue to slowly adjust their forecast.
There is now an interesting divergence between the index and the individual market on the midterms. It results from the index also taking into account future Senate races, eg. 2028 races.
House
The HOUSER index is flat on the day. With no midterms in the next few weeks, we expect the indices to stay relatively flat outside of reacting to global macro developments.
Main Events Of The Day
#1 The Strait Of Hormuz
The Strait of Hormuz continues to be effectively closed:
Traders lowered their forecast and now see only 27% chance we will see traffic normalization by the end of July. The end of year market is also down and traders now see 82% chance traffic normalization will happen by then. It’s down from 89% only a week ago.
Energy traders seem oblivious to the reality on the ground, though. WTI trades below $70 pre barrel:
#2 Tense Colorado Governor Republican Primary
Colorado Governor Republican Primary is extremely tense. Victor Marx and Barbara Kirkmeyer have only 2,000 votes between them.
However, traders, after a brief moment of doubt, give Marx 98% chance to win, suggesting that the remaining ballots are expected to favor Marx. Looks like the initial forecast was on point.
#3 Machado No Longer Expected to Enter Venezuela
After the initial euphoria, traders no longer expect Maria Corina Machado to enter Venezuela this month.
Initially, she announced she was looking to go and help with the post-quake crisis. However, the US government went publicly agains the idea. Traders recognized it as a sign that the project is effectively dead. That being said, the price looks a bit overvalued.
#4 GPT-5.6 Release Date Confirmed?
In a possible insider move, the market now expects GPT-5.6 to be released on July 7th.
We’ve known for weeks that the model is just around the corner. However, till now we had no credible rumors, outside of the US government asking OpenAI to stagger the release of the model. Will the sudden move in the price be confirmed by reality? We’ll see soon enough
#5 Can Grok Catch Up?
With Grok 4.5 rumored to be in private beta, traders see the Grok 4.4 release by mid July as likely.
However, xAI is not even in the race to challenge Anthropic, which is expected to have models on the top 2 places by the end of the month:
Wrap up
That’s all for today!
We will continue to monitor the situation on prediction markets.
Make sure to follow prediction markets live to get fresh information on the conflict. Stay strong and see you tomorrow for another Morning Brief!
This is not official investment or life advice. Do your own research. These are only my opinions and I encourage anyone to do their own research before putting any money anywhere.