Good morning! Both Americans and Iranians have an important event this weekend. While the former are celebrating the 250th anniversary of their independence, the latter have Ali Khamenei’s funeral.
With celebrations and mourning in progress, we expect little developments in the Middle East during the weekend. Outside of that, today we take a look at a small political drama in Hungary, the UK GDP projections and some forecasts around the AI models performance in July.
Let’s take a look at the markets to make sense out of the news!
The Midterms Tracker
RED
RED remains stable at 90.94 points.
Senate
SENR has moved up slightly since yesterday. It is now essentially at 100.
House
HOUSER continues to trend down as its value breached 75 points.
Main Events Of The Day
#1 The Strait Of Hormuz
Nothing has changed in the Strait of Hormuz. The traffic is up from the previous, extremely low levels, but it’s still well below the pre-war normal of over 100 daily crossings.
Traders still see only 27% chance the traffic will normalize by the end of the month. With Khamenei’s funeral and 4th of July celebrations we can expect both sides to give the ships some slack and allow for higher traffic, but normalization over a 7-day period still looks unlikely.
While real product is aligned with Polymarket pricing, main (paper) oil benchmarks are still refusing to accept the reality on the ground with WTI at $68 per barrel:
#2 The Ghost of Khamenei
It turns out we might never see Mojtaba Khamenei again. The new leader of Iran has not been seen since the start of the war. It is rumored that he has suffered grave injuries and he’s in no state to go to the public.
However, traders were speculating that we might see him on his father’s funeral. The price on the end of August market went as high as 39c. However, Iran announced that Mojtaba Khamenei will not appear at the funeral due to a grave risk to his life from Israeli agents and strikes.
The market nuked on the news and the end of August strike trades now at 25c.
#3 No Change in Hungary?
Initially, the new prime minister planned to get rid of the president as soon as possible. In Hungary, a president is a ceremonial function and he is chosen by the parliament, rather than in a popular election.
Traders almost bonded the market, which at one point traded at 91c. However, the Venice Commission has raised some doubts about the move and has just concluded a visit to Hungary to investigate the issue.
Now, traders see only 51% chance Tamas Sulyok will be out by the end of July.
#4 UK GDP Down in the Drain
The market on the UK GDP in 2026 saw a lot of volatility after the Q1 GDP figure was revised down to 0.5%, from 0.6%.
With the energy supply shortage looming, traders now see 51% chance the UK GDP in 2026 will fall between 0% and 1%. The downward revision destroyed market confidence and served as a sign of things to come.
#5 Mythos Is Back (Almost) at the Top
Anthropic is once again poised to have the best Math AI model by the end of July.
After Mythos and Fable were banned by the US government, the market expected Google Gemini to top the math leaderboard. However, a swift reinstatement of the Anthropic frontier models moved the market and now Anthropic has 83 chance of having the top AI model.
As a fun fact, for now it’s Opus 4.6 in Thinking Mode that tops the leaderboard, with Fable 5 just behind it.
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.