저자: Kevin · 외국인
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미국의 호르무즈 해협 해상 봉쇄 가능성과 그 한계를 분석. 해협 바깥만 봉쇄하면 보험 문제로 통항이 사실상 마비되며, 이는 유가를 장기간 높게 유지시켜 위험자산에 불리하다고 봄. 반면 AI 하드웨어(반도체)는 상대적으로 강세이며 SOXL 등 레버리지 ETF 강세를 언급. 사modeled 사모신용 부실 우려로 소프트웨어 약세 전망.
다듬은 글
It's on like Donkey Kong. Donald Trump is going Bowser on us. It looks like Donnie was just reloading. Yesterday, JD Vance announced that talks failed and today we get "Effective immediately, the United States Navy will begin the process of blockading any and all ships trying to enter or leave the strait.
We'll also stop every ship that paid a toll to Iran because if you pay an illegal toll, well, don't expect safe passage on the high seas." Anyway, the the these are what the things that Donald Trump is saying and now we are expecting a naval blockade to be imposed on essentially the Strait of Hormuz.
I'm going to discuss how this could function and some of the real risks that are associated with us because of course, while Donald Trump is threatening to blow any Iranian to hell who fires at us, the Iranians might not actually have to fire at us and this creates some serious issues, which we'll talk about uh well, I probably right now.
How about that? Uh take a look at this. So, here's essentially a map of the region and I put above it in yellow and red here where I think some of our ships might end up going. Uh and the reason I did this is to purposefully show you that the Strait of Hormuz is not where we're going to go park our tankers because we're just going to get blown to smithereens by drone swarms and we'd be a sitting duck in a fish bowl of a 21-mi wide Strait of Hormuz.
Keep in mind that Iran manufactures a ton of drones deep inside of Russia. This is intentional because then you can also ship those drones from Russia back to Iran and use these fiber optic style drones to launch uh warfare essentially from the coastal mountains here. Any of these ridges, caves, whatever.
This is a relatively elevated terrain. You got a little bit of beach and then you get pretty elevated terrain. Makes it really easy uh to uh to to launch sneak attacks from if you will. Uh and uh the range of these fiber optic drones can be as much as 30 mi. So, it's you'd be a sitting duck putting ships inside of the strait here.
And so, what's more likely is that we're going to try to have ships and on the Persian Gulf, also considered the Arabian Gulf side, that's the north uh west side. And then of course in the southeast side, we've got the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Now, my belief is that we're going to keep a lot of our uh uh largest ships that would be sitting ducks out of drone range.
We're going to stay out here. This is where we could launch helicopters, Ospreys, uh F-15s, whatever. We can do that from out here in the Arabian Sea. There's actually a report, and I don't know if this is true, so I just want to asterisk this. There is a report that two US destroyers yesterday, before Donald Trump announced this blockade, tried to cross the Strait of Hormuz and were threatened by Iran and ended up turning around.
The thing is, I don't necessarily know that you actually need the Strait of Hormuz controlled right here to conduct a blockade. To conduct a blockade, you really just need ships here forming essentially a picket line. Because this is where you could stop anyone from going in or out. You don't have to fight over here.
The problem is the big issue with this is if we're going to do a blockade and not a takeover of the strait, then the strait is not actually permeable. See, we might think when we hear blockade, oh, it's going to be a selective blockade. Obviously, we'll have our picket lines and when friendly ships from the Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, when they come and they want to leave the region, we'll let them pass because they're our friends, and we want that oil to enter the oil markets to suppress oil prices, which is what we want.
That would be good. And it chokes off enemy ships like Iranian oil trying to get to China, for example. That is what a lot of people are thinking a blockade does. But let me show you the real problem here. So, if we actually blockade the strait from one side, so for example, this red line here is the permeable blockade.
And the reason I say permeable is is because obviously, the goal is to allow uh our sort of friendlies, if you will, to go through this uh this line. The problem though isn't that red line. The problem really is going to be the orange line, which we're going to put right here at the strait. See, in order It doesn't matter so much if ships can get through this red line, allied ships.
What matters is what happens over here at the strait. Because if at the strait, any kind of ship coming from Saudi Arabia or Qatar uh Qatar or Bahrain, for example, ends up getting attacked by fiber optic drones or uh Shahed 136 uh uh propeller-operated drones, you know, whatever, then no insurance company by any means is going to authorize a ship to actually cross the Strait of Hormuz, and it doesn't matter if Iran has a blockade here and the US has a blockade here, basically traffic goes to a standstill.
The only way you actually fix this is if Donald Trump not only blockades the strait uh from the outside, but he actually goes in and turns this into some form of green zone, which is going to be very difficult to do because you'll not only need more of your A-10 Warthogs, your helicopters, you know, unmanned underwater vehicles, UUVs, which is so weird cuz you we usually think UAV, but anyway, that's aerial, right?
But anyway, the other issue that we face are the mines. Now, the New York Times had a fantastic piece breaking down mines about 3 weeks ago. You know, somebody in the comments made fun of me cuz they're like, "What do you mean people can just, you know, dive up to a ship and stick a mine onto it?" Well, yeah, that's exactly what can be done through what's called a limpet mine.
These are essentially C4-laden explosives where divers coming up, you know, that could look like little fishing trolleys. Divers hop in the water, you know, closer to cargo, and essentially dive up and attach limpet mines onto cargo ships. You know, you could also just drive a, you know, rigid inflatable boat right up to it, probably a little faster depending on if the cargo ship is anchored.
Not the safest thing to dive right up to a moving cargo ship. But anyway, obviously then you have other forms of mines, moored mines, which are attached to the bottom, bottom mines, which a lot of these look for sort of magnetic that a ship is near, drifting mines also, they could be contact-based, they could be magnetic-based, whatever.
The United States can try to clear these. That one way you could do this is by having ships on each side drag a wire, you know, a certain depth under the water and try to pull these moored mines and get them to detonate. Another method is actually sending false magnetic pulses with low-flying planes or you know, unmanned vehicles in the water to actually detonate some of these mines.
This is a lot of work though and it creates a lot of risk and and risk is a problem because it means a blockade doesn't like there's a difference between a blockade and we're going to control the strait and we're going to charge the tolls. Which Donald Trump did suggest that he wanted to charge the tolls.
Last week, there was a reporter and I I remarked about it. I thought it was hilarious. Because last week one of the reporters said, "Hey, well, what do you think about Iran charging tolls uh to, you know, ships going through the Strait of Hormuz?" Because remember, Iran never controlled the strait before.
I mean, even the UAE says that. They're like, "What the hell is going on?" Like, Iran never controlled it before. Why are they now all of a sudden having all this control over it? Well, obviously, it's because Iran has found our Achilles' heel. That little 21 to 30-mi range of land. Which Well, it's 21 mi.
It's mostly a point. Uh but anyway, uh last week, Donald Trump was asked by a reporter, "Hey, you know, what do you think about them charging tolls?" And Trump said, "Us charging tolls?" And the reporter's like, "No, no, no, Iran charging tolls." And Trump's like, "Oh, I thought you meant us charging tolls because we have a concept of a plan where we're going to charge tolls, the greatest tolls anyone has ever seen.
We're going to call them a tariff. Or maybe they're a T tariff, like a like a toll tariff." And And so the the idea here is that Trump actually kind of revealed his hand a little bit last week when he when he said that. He's like, "Oh, we have this plan to charge tolls ourselves." That's really what this blockade would be.
He's like, "All right, well, we'll just The US will tariff it." Fine, but again, you still have to deal with the strip. And there's no indication in what Donald Trump is commenting that we're going to take control of Hormuz. We're just going to block the outside. So, who does this benefit and who does this hurt?
Well, obviously, what this does is it still eliminates Iranian oil from the market, which hurts China because China wants that oil. But China also benefits because this is kind of like a test trial for what a naval blockade of Taiwan would look like. They can watch, and you know they are, what we're doing and see what works and doesn't work because this is like a real-life test in what a blockade could function like against a country that actually has weaponry to fight you, Iran and the US in this case, which is very similar to Taiwan and uh who is, you know, weaponized by America and China.
So, basically, China's like, "Huh, our enemy is testing out our strategy. Let's see what works and what doesn't. This is great." So, China gets the benefit of this intelligence. Russia keeps benefiting because Russia not only supplies and and works with Iran by sharing intelligence, weaponry, data, whatever.
But, Russia benefits as oil prices go up. And so, you kind of have this quagmire of a mess that we've created now with this sort of black blockade and these negotiations, you know, not going through. Donald Trump did end up suggesting that, you know, we basically agreed upon everything except the nuclear issue, which is what we suspected yesterday, but that's obviously the big one.
So, the market impact here, I don't think it'll be as bad as what we saw when Donald Trump threatened to destroy the entire Iranian civiliza- civilization. The United States here would be seen almost as like a cop moderating flow. But, that's only flow on the outside. It it it doesn't help the strait open.
It might might provide some certainty that the strait will be open for business for allies in the future. And it's certainly like way less risky than sending paratroopers and and amphibious units into Kharg Island, which probably a death trap for Americans. And the Iranians have already booby trapped it and they've kind of lost track of where all their booby traps are and mines are anyway, which is also bad.
But, we don't know. And that uncertainty is likely going to lead oil to rise again, certainly over $100. The question is is it going to go over 120 to 150 especially since now the United States Well, not the Well, the whole world basically has fewer stockpiles and reserves. East Asia, the United Kingdom, Europe, whatever.
So, the real question here is if oil skyrockets, you know, if it's anything like last time when we went over $100, the S&P 500 sold off 5%. The question really is how quickly can the blockade be set up and from there how quickly can we actually control the Strait of Hormuz? Without US escort, without guarantees of their safety going through the strait, ship traffic is still going to collapse.
Oil prices will be higher for longer, and Iran knows this. So, if the United States is going to choke Iran from the top and bottom, whether they even get inside, you know, if whether we control from inside the Gulf or outside doesn't really matter. You really only need to control one side. Uh Iran's going to choke the middle.
That creates this impossible insurance problem. Uh and so, it likely means that we are seeing higher for longer oil prices and higher for longer in terms of or more for longer uncertainty, which is not great for risk assets, you know, bad for Bitcoin, bad for uh you know, growth and tech stocks, software stocks, whatever.
I'm still of the mindset that uh hardware and chips is is doing quite well right now, mostly because and and I think it's, you know, SOXL 3X ETF. You know, we've been calling this for about a week now, and over the last week, I think SOXL's up like 70%. It's insane. The Those are very risky. SOXL, those are 3X leveraged ETFs.
So, you know, they can go 3X up, but they can also 3X down rapidly. Uh I think that's because a lot of investors think that they don't really know where to invest in software that's going to survive adapting to artificial intelligence. So, they're like, "All right. Well, we know that hardware is being used for now, so let's just use that, and those stocks are going up, so why not?" And in fairness, AMD, Nvidia, a lot of these companies have ridiculously cheap valuations.
They can absolutely grow into these valuations a lot. AMD could definitely get to uh Nvidia could definitely justify somewhere around uh $300 a share, AMD probably 275. There's There's a lot of room in the valuations for these, and I think that's why they've moved, and they've been seen as a little bit of a safer spot during all this uncertainty, because you still have private credit woes, which aren't getting better.
Now, the Federal Reserve is investigating private credit woes and the bank exposure to private credit. So, that suggests private credit woes are nowhere near done. Private credit woes are amplified by software, so of course if private credit is doing poorly because of software, then software is also cyclically going to do poorly because of private credit woes.
So, you know, people dump private credit in the private space because of software, but also publicly, so software gets hit hard. Uh, it's very difficult to bet on the consumer in this sort of environment. Uh, and so that's why I think why you're getting a lot of this attention on on artificial intelligence hardware because that is that is still doing decently well.
Of course, at some point the cycle will slow, but the slowing hasn't happened yet. Now, uh, Pakistan promises that talks are not dead. This is just a stalemate. Okay, bro. That he obviously is like, "Hey guys, guys, let's make a deal. Let's make a deal." Uh, Lebanon is still seeing strikes continue.
Israel just had another soldier die. They also struck and killed more Hezbollah militants. They call everybody a Hezbollah militant, so it's hard to know if they are or aren't. But anyway, Israel spent over 11.5 billion dollars on the war so far, which is less than what we spent, but you know, whatever.
Uh, it does look like the UAE is complaining that Iran has never had control over the strait, so there will and they shouldn't. So, there will likely be some form of international support for getting this sort of blockade situated. Uh, the UK has promised in the past maybe sending mine sweeping equipment to help sweep mines.
Uh, but this is going to take a while. And so this is problematic and it probably means we have an entire April of actually trying to get the strait reopened again, which um, it'll be a day-by-day, play-by-play to see how much success we have with that because remember, blockade doesn't mean an open strait.
Anyway, I hope that's helpful for you. If it is, do consider checking out meetkevin.com. We have a whole lot of helpful information on taxes, forming LLCs, insurances. I mean, you've got nine courses that come with all the trade alerts, the private live streams, the Alpha report, the reinvest course, that's a brand new one that I filmed in in December of 2025.
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