Your IMPORTANT Weekly Briefing: (7th August 2026)

Welcome back to this weeks newsletter!

1. Weekly Spotlight

Wheat Is Up 25% And That's The Least Of It

Since 22nd July, the three biggest ports in Odessa haven't handled a single foreign cargo ship between them.

Nobody blockaded them either, the problem is due to the insurers refusing to insure any ships there.

You'd expect that to show up in food prices, but it really hasn't (yet). Wheat is up about 25% since January, which is a two year high, but still nowhere near where it got to in 2022.

However, I think three things are landing at once here and few people have connected the dots.

The first is the ports, and it's bigger than it looks. Shipments out of the Black Sea in late July were down over 40% on last year, and Russia and Ukraine are about 32% of the world's wheat trade between them.

Russia sells both wheat and fertiliser, so I wouldn't expect Moscow to be in any rush to fix that…

The second is that the crop was already short before any of this, and the USDA numbers are worse than expected. Across the seven biggest exporters, who handle 84% of world trade, production is down 11% this season. American wheat alone is down 26% from drought.

The UK is in an even worse position (watch today’s walk & talk for the details).

The third is fertiliser.

When the strait of Hormuz shut, fertiliser prices went up sharply (fertiliser is made using natural gas, so energy costs feed straight into it).

That damage won’t show up in this harvest but it will show up in the next one.

So why does that make this different to 2022? Well because back then there was one shock and one fix, and prices came back down within months once the corridor deal got the ships moving again.

This time you'd need a Black Sea deal, a Hormuz deal and a Red Sea deal, and then on top of all that you'd need it to rain.

So no, I don't think we're repeating 2022, but the direction only goes one way from here. The people who will feel this crisis first are grain importers across North Africa and the Middle East, already paying more for fuel.

One to watch for sure…

2. Quick Takes

Here are the other top stories shaping the week:

• Iran Wants The Right To Ban US Ships From Hormuz

  Iranian state media says lawmakers are pushing to suspend transit rights under the Oman-brokered shipping agreement for vessels linked to the US, Israel and other countries Tehran considers hostile. Traffic through the strait has already collapsed, with just 33 vessels crossing between Monday and Thursday against 50 the week before, and only six crude tankers getting out. Trump says the strait is "sort of open right now" because the US Navy controls the blockade

• The US Has Used 80% Of Its Missile Interceptors

  Five months of war with Iran has burned through nearly 80% of America's THAAD interceptors and roughly half its Patriots. Analysts at CSIS put Patriot stocks between 759 and 827, down from 2,330 before the war, and think it could take until mid-2029 to rebuild. Trump insists the US has "massive amounts" of munitions and says the leakers behind the reports are being hunted down, with long prison sentences sought

• Saudi Arabia, Turkey And Pakistan Are Signing A Joint Defence Pact

  The three leaders are gathered in the Red Sea city for a trilateral defence agreement that sources say may carry a mutual defence clause, with signing expected today or tomorrow. It ties together NATO's second-largest army, the Arab world's only G20 economy, and the Muslim world's only nuclear-armed state, building on the Saudi-Pakistan pact signed last year

• US Intelligence Says Russia Could Attack NATO In The Next Three Years

  Here we go again… Officials told the Wall Street Journal that Putin may test the alliance with a small land incursion or cyber attacks somewhere between this autumn and 2029. That is a three-year window, which makes the warning almost impossible to get wrong. It also reverses the previous assessment that he would not risk it while still tied up in Ukraine.

• The US Has Sent Spies Into Cuba, And Iran Isn't Slowing It Down

  Politico reports the CIA has significantly expanded its presence on the island, and the New York Times has since revealed a dedicated new Cuba task force. Washington's energy blockade has already left Cuba's 10 million people facing repeated nationwide blackouts and a collapsing health system. That same intelligence build-up preceded Venezuela, and officials are openly treating it as the template

• Trump Is Trying To End Birthright Citizenship

  Two executive orders were signed on Thursday. One restricts visas for visitors coming to the US to give birth, the other strips citizenship from children born to people classed as alien enemies, foreign terrorists or foreign agents. The Supreme Court threw out the first attempt 6-3 in June, a ruling Trump called "very, very unfortunate" while describing these new orders as adjustments

• America Lost Jobs In July, And The Unemployment Rate Fell Anyway

  The US economy shed 23,000 jobs against forecasts of 83,000 added. May and June were both revised down as well, wiping another 103,000 from the books and leaving June's already weak figure at just 20,000. Local government education lost 50,000 roles and retail lost 19,000. Unemployment still dropped to 4.1%, because the participation rate keeps falling as people stop looking for work altogether

• Meta Has Been Fined $567 Million For Harming Children's Mental Health

  A New Mexico judge ruled that Facebook and Instagram amount to a public nuisance, ordering Meta to pay $567 million and accept court-imposed safety measures for the next five years. Those include monthly time limits for teenagers, restrictions on notifications, tighter controls on adults contacting minors, and safeguards on AI chatbots

• Congress Went On Holiday Without Voting On The Crypto Bill

  The Senate left Washington for a month-long recess without taking up the CLARITY Act, pushing crypto market structure rules to September at the earliest. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have now seen roughly $5 billion of net outflows this year

• AI Has Just Designed 16 Viruses That Have Never Existed In Nature

  A Stanford-led team used an AI model called Evo, trained on genetic code the way ChatGPT was trained on text, to write viruses from scratch. They built roughly 300 of the designs and 16 came out alive. These only attack E. coli bacteria and cannot infect people, and human viruses were kept out of the training data entirely… I don’t know about you, but I find this more concerning than positive. What is an AI goes rogue and designs a deadly virus?!

3. Chart Of The Week

Asia Now Holds All Four Of The World's Most Powerful Passports

Singapore's passport now gets you into 192 countries without a visa, up from 173 a decade ago, making it the strongest in the world.

Japan, South Korea and the UAE are tied second on 188, giving Asia all four top spots. The UAE has added 153 destinations in 20 years, the fastest climb of anyone.

The US and UK have both gained destinations since 2016 but dropped down the table, with America now 15th on 180.

4. Market Overview

S&P 500 (U.S.) 
Rose. The mood flipped early in the week, tech came roaring back and both the S&P 500 and the Dow closed at records on Tuesday. Talk of a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz helped, and earnings did plenty too, with the big cloud names showing all that AI spending is finally being turned into money. It wobbled midweek, then picked back up on Friday after a weaker-than-expected jobs report took some heat off the Fed.

FTSE 100 (UK)
Crept higher. Miners led the way, Antofagasta, Anglo American, Glencore and Rio all rallied as copper climbed, and Hormuz optimism kept things ticking along. It was a monster week for results though, and not all of them landed. HSBC fell despite a big jump in profit and Prudential took a knock, so the gains never went broad.

S&P/TSX Composite (Canada)
Rose, setting records along the way. Gold and silver were what mattered, materials jumped on Tuesday as bullion, silver and platinum all climbed, and gold hit a one-month peak the next day. Tech tagged along early on upbeat AI comments from Palantir and Caterpillar, and energy added a bit as oil rose after Houthi rebels attacked a Saudi tanker in the Red Sea.

ASX 200 (Australia)
Up, and its best week in four months. Gold stocks shone again and the index kept setting record highs, with banks, miners and healthcare names pulling money away from the volatile AI trade. Friday it took a breather as oil pushed higher on fresh Hormuz worries.

🇺🇸 United States – S&P 500

• High: 7,791

• Low: 7,531

🇬🇧 UK - FTSE 100

• High: 10,955

• Low: 10,833

🇨🇦 Canada – TSX Composite

• High: 36,432

• Low: 35,569

🇦🇺 Australia – ASX 200

• High: 9,288

• Low: 8,943

Cryptocurrency:

• Bitcoin (BTC): 3.8%

• Ethereum (ETH): 3.3%

• Tether (USDT): 0.0%

• BNB (BNB): 1.2%

• USDC (USDC): 0.0%

• XRP (XRP): -3.3%

  Solana (SOL): 1.3%

• TRON (TRX): 0.6%

• Figure Heloc (FIGR_HELOC): -0.1%

• Hyperliquid (HYPE): 2.6%

Metals Market:

Gold–Silver Ratio: ~68:1, Fell this week, down 2.75%, which means silver ran harder than gold. It swung around a fair bit along the way, as high as 71.1 and as low as 66.9, before settling at 68.5. Both metals had a good week, silver just did more of the work.

Gold & Silver:

• Gold:  7.25% with a Week High: $4,371 & Week Low: $4,020

• Silver: 10.09% with a Week High: $65.14 & Week Low: $56.61

5. Faith & Success

This week was one of the most difficult weeks I’ve had in a very long time. And this verse really hit hard and cemented a strong lesson…

To cut a long story short, my team were doing a repair to the front wall on Monday when health and safety came by and closed them down. I didn't think it was a big deal, I thought it would be just a simple as finding out what was wrong, making those changes and then continuing the work.

Boy was I wrong! Apparently when you get close down by health and safety, it's a really really big deal.

What started with Dom (my 70 year old head Stonemason) not wearing a hard hat, quickly escalated into risk assessments, Insurances, plant hire, safety nets, safe working areas, was the tree safe? etc… the list just went on.

And the problems just seemed to escalate… no matter what I did, it seemed to be the wrong thing.

We thought we were doing everything correctly, we even got temporary traffic lights so we could work in the road as our safe working area. It had been sanctioned by the highways inspector too who helped us get the traffic lights approved.

But eventually, the whole affair became a huge intergovernmental fight between the different departments. With me stuck in the middle as the homeowner.

Finally today it looks like we've got some form of resolution, in that my beautiful - almost 200 year-old oak tree - has got to be taken down in order to repair the front wall. And because the wall is already down, there’s no option to now reverse course and save the tree.

It’s such a shame as we have a report that shows the tree roots have grown backwards into the bank and are supporting the tree. It’s stood there for almost 200 years with no problems. We even got a health report which agrees the tree is healthy.

But another report commissioned said that it was best for all concerned to remove the tree. So that’s it. 2 say remove, 1 says retain.

This situation then began a fight between Forrestry (who want to protect the tree) and Health & Safety who want it down. I wasn’t aware just how powerful a single H&S inspector is until this week. A low level H&S inspector has more power than almost anyone else in the Government! No joke!

But I really do feel that if we had just been allowed to finish the wall repair, no one would have been the wiser - and the tree could have lived to see another 50 years or more (according to the structural engineer).

It's only because all of this took place outside the front of the Castle that people took an interest in the work going on. And a H&S rep just happened to be driving by at the wrong time.

So after spending a week of my life with the most intense stress I think I've ever suffered, it made me realise that I don't want to project manage any more of the major works going forward.

I’ve really enjoyed the project management aspect over the last 4 years, but I feel it’s now time to hand it over to someone else…

This verse is correct: Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.

Had I brought in my structural engineers in the first place, I think all of this could have been avoided. But because I saw it as just a ‘simple wall repair’ at the front of the property (this then became a major wall repair).

I overlooked getting the correct level of advice when it merited it. I won’t make that same mistake again.

So here's my advice for you: always get the right counsel.

Have a great week my friend!

Take care, and God Bless.

Neil,

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DISCLAIMER
This newsletter is 100% FREE & is designed to help your thinking, not direct it. These newsletters shall NOT be construed as tax, legal, or financial advice and may be outdated or inaccurate; all decisions made as a result of this information are yours alone.

Trading/Liability: Neil McCoy-Ward operates/trades under a private Ltd company within the Isle of Man.

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