The Suez Canal is closed to commercial transit for 5 consecutive days before Dec 31, 2026
A multi-day chokepoint closure pushes cargo onto routings that add weeks of sailing time, lifting charter rates, war-risk premiums, bunker consumption, and expediting costs while contractual delivery dates and penalty clauses stay where they were. A fixed payout on the closure lands while you are paying those costs, before the freight market has finished repricing.
- Reference route
- Suez Canal (illustrative)
- Trigger
- 5 consecutive closure days
- Observation
- Execution → Dec 31, 2026
Term sheet
Terms for discussion. Not an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to enter into any transaction. Size, availability, and pricing are agreed bilaterally with eligible contract participants.
- Structure
- Binary event contract, negotiated bilaterally.
- Trigger event
- The Suez Canal is closed to commercial transit for five or more consecutive days.
- Reference route
- The Suez Canal.
- Observation period
- Execution date through December 31, 2026.
- Reference source
- Official Suez Canal Authority notices and publications. A supplemental transit-data series may be specified at execution.
- Determination
- Closure means suspension of qualifying commercial transit. Partial-restriction and reopening rules are set out in the documentation.
- Payout
- Fixed amount agreed at execution, payable upon the first qualifying closure. If no qualifying closure occurs within the observation period, the contract expires at zero.
- Premium
- Paid in full at execution.
- Settlement
- Cash settlement within five business days of determination.
- Size and tenor
- Notional and tenor negotiated bilaterally at execution.
- Customization
- Alternative durations, vessel classes, transit-count structures, and other routes are available and priced accordingly.
- Documentation
- Bilateral contract specifying the route, vessel class, closure definition, data sources, determination process, and settlement timeline in full, including the fallback where a reference source becomes unavailable.
The economic exposure
The bill is additional sailing days on a diverted routing and the charter and bunker cost attached to them, war-risk premium on the affected leg, demurrage and detention while boxes sit, penalty and expediting clauses triggered by missed delivery windows, and the working capital absorbed by the inventory buffer you carry until the lane normalizes. Fixed-price supply agreements leave those costs with the shipper.
Freight derivatives trade on a limited set of benchmark routes and settle on published indices. Exposure in a different lane, or in demurrage and contract penalties, correlates loosely, and the unhedged remainder is large. Commodity futures hedge the price of the goods. Moving the goods is a different residual. Marine insurance addresses defined insured losses. Extra transit time is a different claim. A contract written on the closure targets the driver, and pays a fixed sum against your realized bill.
Why this structure
The disruption is discrete and the costs are date-driven. You set the route, the vessel class, and the number of days at execution, so you write the contract around the lane you ship and the duration at which your penalty clauses begin to bite. Determination uses route-authority notices and observed transit data, both public, neither requiring access to your books.
What it does not do. Traffic can thin out, or the route authority can restrict transit by draft, flag, or convoy, without declaring a formal suspension. Costs rise and the contract does not pay. A transit-count trigger fits the partial-restriction case.
Other exposure areas
Discrete structures similar exposures the same way.
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