Editor's Note: Larry Benedict — the hedge fund legend who beat the S&P 500 by 18 times in 2025 and made his clients $95 million during the 2008 crisis — says Trump's installation of a new Federal Reserve chair is triggering the most significant shift in U.S. markets in nearly 20 years. He has already identified the one ticker he believes will be at the center of the money flows — and he's revealing it completely free. Click here to see the details or read more below…

Dear Reader,

Move your money as soon as possible.

That is the urgent message from Larry Benedict, the trader who generated $274 million in profits for his clients.

Click here to hear his warning

You see, every time the Federal Reserve makes a major move, certain assets move with it, and if you're positioned correctly, the returns can be extraordinary.

When the Fed cut rates in 2020, Larry's readers had the chance to make 62% from a single position.

When it signaled rate hikes in January 2022, they could have made 117% in under a month.

When Fed Chair Jerome Powell spoke at Jackson Hole, Larry had his readers positioned for an 89% gain in just 17 days.

Now, President Trump is installing a new Fed chair and Larry says it's triggering what could be the most significant shift in the U.S. financial system in nearly 20 years.

He has already identified the single ticker he says will be at the center of where the money flows.

Click here to discover the one move Larry is recommending now

Best wishes,

Lauren Wingfield
Managing Editor, The Opportunistic Trader

P.S. If you want to be positioned ahead of what Larry is calling the best setup he’s seen in 20 years, click here now.

Monday, August 3, 2026

Roughly 6% of fleet capacity disappeared into distance and time.

On July 23, ten ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Normal traffic is about 140 per day. Iran has blocked the strait since late February. That closure made headlines.

Three months earlier, traffic around the Cape of Good Hope hit a record. Twenty-four million deadweight tonnes of tanker traffic passed the southern tip of Africa in a single week in April. That made no headlines. Three chokepoints are now closed or restricted. All three are pushing overflow into the same corridor. No one is measuring its capacity.

Every major shipping chokepoint that closed this year had an institution behind it. Iran closed Hormuz. The Houthis declared a blockade. The Panama Canal Authority cut draft limits. Each announced the restriction. All three now drain into a single backup route around Africa, and that route has no managing body, no rationing protocol, and no one who will announce when it is full.

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Hormuz is the most visible. Iran blocked it in February 2026. Traffic fell to roughly 7% of normal. Oil tankers that once passed through the Persian Gulf now take longer paths, many of them around Africa.

The Red Sea is the second source. Houthi forces declared a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia on July 20. Yanbu is Saudi Arabia's main Red Sea export port. It handled 92% of Saudi seaborne crude in June. Within a week of the blockade, crude loadings from Yanbu dropped 30%. That oil needs another route out.

The Panama Canal is the third. On July 1, the Canal Authority announced two draft reductions, the first taking effect July 24. An El Niño pattern is draining the reservoir that feeds the locks. Average daily long-term slots fell from four to three. LPG carriers got squeezed hardest. In April, 43% of US Gulf-to-Asia LPG voyages went around the Cape instead of through Panama. That is a record since 2016.

Three restrictions. Three institutions that announced them. One place absorbing the overflow.

Observation: Commercial traffic around Africa has more than tripled since 2023.
Interpretation: Three managed closures are compounding into a single unmanaged corridor. The overflow has no other place to go.

This is not a temporary detour anymore. Major carriers stopped treating it as one.

MSC and CMA CGM built their 2026 shipping networks around the Cape route. Not as a contingency plan. As the default. A quarter of the global container fleet now trades the Far East-to-Europe lane via the Cape. It is the second largest single shipping lane in the world for container vessels.

The detour adds about 3,500 nautical miles and 10 to 14 extra days per voyage. Those extra days absorb ships. The vessels are not lost. They carry the same cargo on a longer loop. But while they are in transit, their capacity is unavailable for other work. That absorption adds up to 5 to 7% of the global container fleet. Roughly 1.3 to 1.8 million container units removed from effective supply.

No ship sank. No port closed. The capacity vanished into distance and time.

Observation: An estimated 5 to 7% of global container fleet capacity is absorbed by the Cape detour alone.
Interpretation: The route works like a slow drain on shipping supply. The longer the detour persists, the more capacity it swallows, with no visible event marking the loss.

Cape Town is the anchor port of this route. It was not built for this volume.

The World Bank and S&P Global ranked Cape Town last out of 400 container ports worldwide in their 2025 performance index. Dead last. Vessel traffic surged 112%. Average wait times stretched past six days. Some services reported delays up to 12. The terminal used to berth four large ships at once. Now it handles three.

The response is coming. Transnet Port Terminals announced R96 million, about $5.3 million, for four new straddle carriers in June 2026. A 25-year concession to bring in a private operator has been proposed. It has not started. A container expansion project targets December 2026.

The weight arrived in 2024. The infrastructure response arrives in late 2026 at the earliest. That gap is where the system degrades.

Observation: Cape Town ranked last of 400 global ports while absorbing a 112% surge in vessel traffic.
Interpretation: The anchor port of the world's busiest detour is the weakest link in the chain. Its limits compound every delay the route already imposes.

Each of the three chokepoints had a warning system. Hormuz had a military crisis and a headline. Panama had an authority that published draft limits and rationed slots. The Houthi blockade was declared on camera. Each closure came from an institution that could say "this is restricted."

The Cape has no equivalent. No authority controls its traffic. No one rations capacity. It does not close. It slows. Wait times creep up. Fleet capacity disappears into longer voyages. No institution will announce that it is full.

Two signals are worth tracking. The first is Cape Town's port wait time, which has already stretched from days to weeks for some services. The second is the share of global fleet absorbed by the detour. Both are creeping upward.

There is a flip side. If any of the three chokepoints reopens, that absorbed capacity, roughly 6% of the global fleet, floods back into the market almost overnight. Tightness could swing to glut. The system is strained in both directions.

Three chokepoints closed with warnings this year. The backup route absorbing all three has no one watching the gauge. The signal is not a closure announcement. It is wait times and fleet absorption, both rising, with no one at the valve.

Until next time,
The Navigator