Wednesday the truce died and crude spiked while the metals fell; Thursday the market reconsidered. West Texas Intermediate gave back a dollar and a half, gold and silver reversed higher, and the distillate crack spread — the war-tell — slipped from $80.10 to $77.93 a barrel. And still the book made money, because the engine that carried it was never the spike: it was the rotation up the artificial-intelligence value chain, and on Thursday Broadcom led the Nasdaq up 1.3 percent.

Dashboard — July 9, 2026 Settled Close

All equity, index, and futures settles two-source confirmed to the cent (yfinance batch OHLC + Yahoo v8 chart API). The distillate crack spread is computed as front-month ULSD (heating-oil contract) times forty-two, less front-month WTI, in dollars per barrel. Day changes are measured against the Wednesday, July 8 settled close.

I. The Spike Reconsidered

The renewed strikes announced fifteen minutes after Wednesday’s close were the sort of headline that, three weeks ago, would have gapped crude higher at the Thursday open. It did the opposite. West Texas Intermediate settled down 1.96 percent at $72.08 and Brent down 2.20 percent at $76.30 — roughly a third of Wednesday’s truce-death spike handed back in a single session. Kharg Island was not struck; the stranded Qatari carrier cleared; and the market, which had spent Wednesday pricing the worst, spent Thursday pricing the merely bad.

The most telling number was the distillate crack spread. The war-tell — the margin to refine a barrel of crude into the diesel and jet fuel the conflict actually threatens — slipped from $80.10 to $77.93 a barrel. It remains extraordinarily elevated by any peacetime standard, which is why the refiners held most of Wednesday’s gains even as crude fell: Valero eased only 0.6 percent and Marathon Petroleum actually added 0.9 percent to $283.30. The spread narrowing while the refiner stays bid is the market saying the supply fear is real but the immediate escalation is not.

II. The Metals Come Back

Wednesday’s cleanest signal was that gold and silver fell on a truce-death day — the 2026 inversion in one print. Thursday they reversed: gold up 1.47 percent to $4,130.60, silver up 3.81 percent to $60.38, recovering most of what the prior session took. This is not a repudiation of the thesis; it is the ordinary noise around it. The structural claim has never been that the metals fall every day of the war — only that they are no longer the war’s primary transmission channel. On a day when crude fell and the crack spread narrowed, a bounce in gold financed by a softer dollar and a one-basis-point decline in the ten-year is exactly what the framework would predict, and no threat to it.

III. Broadcom Carries the Tape

The Nasdaq Composite gained 1.30 percent to 26,206.89, more than four times the Dow’s 0.27 percent, and the engine was the same one that has driven the book for a month: the rotation up the artificial-intelligence value chain into the hyperscalers and the custom-silicon designers. Broadcom Inc. (“AVGO”) settled up 3.2 percent at $401.11, back above $400 for the first time since the escalation began, and dragged the semiconductor complex with it even as the memory names stayed heavy. The VIX fell more than six percent to 15.84, unwinding Wednesday’s fear bid. A market that was pricing a war on Wednesday was pricing an earnings season on Thursday.

IV. The Pair Book — a Quiet Green Day

Twenty-six active pairs per the v6 canonical book of record. Day is the July 8 to July 9 settled move; QTD is measured from the June 30 settled close per the period-baseline rule; pairs marked † (P39, P40, P41) were opened during the quarter and their QTD is inception-to-date. Exact inception share counts throughout; zero notional approximation. Ranked by unrealized profit and loss.

The book made +$2,288.10 on the day — a quiet green session after Wednesday’s $34,500 blowout, and green is the point on a day when crude fell against a book now carrying a long-refiner tilt. P39 (long AVGO / short Intel) led again at +$3,287 as Broadcom cleared $400 and Intel slipped, and the pair now carries +$51,201 unrealized, the largest single position in the book. P12 (long MetLife / short CVS) added +$3,919 and P17 (long Sibanye / short Honda) +$3,635 on the metals bounce. The costs were the refiner-adjacent give-back: P24 (long Alphabet / short JetBlue) paid −$7,327 as Alphabet eased and the airline bounced with crude; P32 (long Chevron / short American Express) lost −$4,316 as the oil major fell with the barrel; and P36 (long Chevron / short Broadcom) gave back −$3,608 to its rallying short leg. Quarter-to-date the book stands at +$54,176.82; active unrealized is −$137,682.30 against the frozen realized register of +$487,933.25, for an inception-to-date (“ITD”) result of $350,250.95 — a fresh high for the cycle, up from $347,962.85 at Wednesday’s restated close.

V. Harvest Shadow — the Edge Widens to $293,294

The standing counterfactual: the ten pairs closed at the June 30 settled-close sweep, marked forward as though the harvest had never happened, exits frozen at their actual June 30 prints. Through the July 9 close the harvest decision is $293,293.71 better than holding would have been — wider still than Wednesday’s $282,454, as Corning’s continued unwind from its late-June spike keeps punishing the hold path on the three GLW-short structures.

VI. Looking to Friday

Delta Air Lines reports Friday morning — the premarket catalyst anchor, its filing sourced from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR system. Delta is not a book leg, but its read-through is: the P31 short leg is Delta, and P24’s short leg is JetBlue, so an airline print into a week when jet fuel led the tape cuts directly across two active pairs. Beyond Friday sits the Tuesday double catalyst — the global systemically important bank results and the first policy meeting of the Warsh Federal Reserve — and, as ever, a weekend of untradeable headline risk from a war that formally re-ignited this week. The de-risk discipline that has governed the last several weekends will be back on the desk by Friday’s close.