Wall Street opens the week on uneasy footing. U.S. stock futures were mixed early Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average pointing to a 0.09% gain while the S&P 500 slipped 0.31% and the Nasdaq 100 dropped 1.30%, according to premarket data reported by Benzinga. The Russell 2000 was roughly flat, down 0.03%.

The divergence follows a weekend in which the United States and Iran exchanged fresh military strikes, reigniting fears over oil supply through the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. Central Command said the latest round was the fourth American strike on Iran within the past week, ordered in direct response to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacking a commercial container ship transiting the strait. Multiple outlets, including CNN and Al Jazeera, reported that Iran struck American military installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman and Qatar over the weekend, while U.S. forces hit roughly 140 Iranian military targets overnight Saturday alone, up from about 90 on Wednesday and 80 the night before.

Oil Is Doing the Talking

Crude prices are the clearest signal of how seriously traders are taking the escalation. Brent crude, the international benchmark, climbed 4.04% over the weekend to $79.08 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate jumped 4.54% to $74.65, according to Benzinga’s own commodities desk. By Monday’s early New York session some of that spike had eased, with WTI up a more modest 2.13% near $72.93.

Mohamed El-Erian, the economist, warned in a weekend note that a “significant intensification of the skirmishes between the U.S. and Iran will test the prevailing market consensus that such developments are unlikely to evolve into a full-scale military conflict.” If that consensus holds, he wrote, oil should open “higher but not dramatically so — with Brent crude in the high $70s or very low $80s”; if it breaks down, he sees crude able to “surge into the low-to-mid $80s initially.”

Iran’s state media has claimed the Strait of Hormuz is now closed to shipping entirely. CENTCOM disputes that account, maintaining that “traffic is flowing” through the chokepoint that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas trade. For markets, that disagreement is itself the risk: even a partial slowdown in tanker traffic tends to move prices, as the broader economic fallout from the Iran-Israel conflict has shown repeatedly since the war began.

Bonds and the Fed Are Watching Too

The bond market is registering the same nervousness. The 10-year Treasury yield stood at 4.57% Monday morning, with the 2-year at 4.22%. The CME Group’s FedWatch tool shows traders pricing a 68.5% probability that the Federal Reserve leaves interest rates unchanged at this month’s meeting, a sign that oil-driven inflation risk is complicating the case for a near-term rate cut.

Elsewhere, gold slipped 1.13% to around $4,074.57 an ounce even as geopolitical risk escalated, suggesting traders are still favoring cash and short-term Treasurys over the metal for now. The U.S. Dollar Index eased 0.09% to about 100.86, and Bitcoin fell 1.25% to roughly $63,116, underperforming the broader risk-off mood in equities.

Asia Mixed, Europe Higher

Asian markets closed without a clear direction Monday: China’s CSI 300, South Korea’s Kospi and Japan’s Nikkei 225 all fell, while Australia’s ASX 200, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng and India’s Nifty 50 rose. European markets traded higher in early action, a sign the Iran-driven selloff was concentrated in U.S. futures rather than spreading evenly across global equities.

Investors also face a busy week of U.S. data regardless of how the Iran conflict develops. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is due to release the June Consumer Price Index and Producer Price Index later this week, alongside retail sales figures and a string of commentary from Federal Reserve officials — all landing against a backdrop of oil back above $70 a barrel that could complicate the inflation picture just as the Fed weighs its next move.

What to Watch for the Open

  • Any confirmation of whether tankers are actually transiting the Strait of Hormuz will move oil prices more than the rhetoric from either side.
  • A close above $75 a barrel on WTI would put crude at its highest level since the conflict began, adding pressure on the Fed to hold rates steady.
  • This week’s CPI and PPI reports from the BLS will show whether the current oil spike has started feeding into broader inflation data, or whether it is still too early to tell.
  • Investors looking to hedge overnight geopolitical risk without picking individual stocks can also look at broader oil market exposure rather than waiting out the volatility in cash.

Markets have treated Middle East flare-ups as temporary shocks for much of the past year, and Monday’s mixed futures suggest traders are still not convinced this one changes the bigger picture. But with oil back near $75 a barrel and a fourth round of US-Iran strikes in a week, this is exactly the kind of event that shows up on lists of potential black-swan risks for 2026 — the kind that markets ignore, until suddenly they can’t.

Sources: Benzinga premarket index and commodities data, July 13, 2026; CME Group FedWatch tool; Mohamed El-Erian weekend market commentary, reported by Benzinga; U.S. Central Command statements on strikes against Iran; CNN and Al Jazeera reporting on the weekend US-Iran military exchange; Bureau of Labor Statistics economic release schedule.