The Baltic Dry Index closed Thursday 10 September at 3,521, down 99 points, its second straight negative session and a pullback from the near-five-year high of 3,628 struck just six sessions earlier on 4 September. Capesize did almost all of the damage. Brent, meanwhile, is sharply lower today at $104.61/bbl, down 2.81% on the day (BloombergHT, 12 September, 13:14 GMT+3), as diplomatic moves over Hormuz shipping take some of the war-risk premium back out of the barrel. The freight side is correcting from a high; the cost side is correcting from a spike. Neither move should be read as a trend reversal on one session alone.

Baltic indices — close of 10 September 2026

Capesize gave back a large part of the week’s advance in a single session, shedding 278 points and $2,522/day off the 182 5TC to $55,519 — the sharpest one-day retreat of the month, though the index remains well above where it started September. Panamax eased a further 5 points to $21,684, its third soft-to-flat session in a row, consistent with the thinning Atlantic cargo replenishment flagged in last week’s Baltic Exchange roundup. The geared segments continue to ignore the Capesize noise entirely: Supramax and Handysize both added points and dollars again, with Handysize now firmer for an eighth consecutive session and earnings at $16,751 closing in on the $5,000/day gap it has held against Supramax for most of the month.

Route levels — Baltic Exchange, week of 7-11 September 2026

The Baltic Exchange Week 37 bulk report describes a mixed week on Capesize, with the Pacific supplying the volatility. C5 West Australia-Qingdao opened in the low $18s, firmed to around $18.50 by midweek on regular miner participation, then slipped back below $18/mt into the close as sentiment softened. C3 Tubarao-Qingdao held broadly in the low $41s throughout, with occasional fixtures reported towards $42. Taken together the report puts the BCI 182 5TC at $55,139 at the week’s end, down $1,492 from Monday’s $57,011 — a figure that sits close to, though not identical with, the $55,519 print derived above from the index’s own daily change series for 10 September; the two are calculated over slightly different windows and both are reported here rather than reconciled.

Bunkers — close of 11 September 2026

All three benchmark ports posted large increases in the 11 September session, the delivered-price tail end of the week’s crude rally arriving just before today’s Brent pullback. Fujairah remains the dearest VLSFO port at $959.00, a $80.50 premium over Rotterdam and $80.50 over Singapore also — a Gulf premium that has held for over a week now. MGO moved even harder: Singapore’s distillate jumped $99.50 in the session, the same magnitude as Fujairah’s move, pushing the Singapore VLSFO-MGO spread out to $496.50/mt, the widest it has been this month. Owners and charterers pricing ECA-heavy itineraries off yesterday’s bunker numbers should treat today’s Brent move as a signal that the input cost has likely peaked for the moment, not as a reason to re-run the stem at a lower number yet — delivered bunker prices lag crude by several sessions in both directions.

Two developments worth noting

Hormuz diplomacy is doing what the market could not: capping the risk premium. Brent surged roughly 9% over the course of last week before today’s reversal, and the immediate trigger for the pullback is reporting that Gulf Cooperation Council diplomats are due to meet their Iranian counterpart in Oman on Monday to discuss a temporary arrangement for managing shipping through the strait. Nothing is agreed yet, and a single diplomatic meeting does not retire a war-risk premium that took weeks to build, but the market has clearly chosen to price the possibility rather than wait for the outcome.

The Atlantic cargo story has not gone anywhere, even as the index cools. Brazilian iron ore loadings are reported up sharply week on week, Guinean bauxite continues to generate long-haul Capesize employment into China, and the pool of unfixed Capesize tonnage ballasting toward the South Atlantic is running at roughly half of where it stood a year ago. That combination is consistent with Friday’s pullback being profit-taking after a five-year-high print rather than a genuine change in underlying demand, which argues for treating the one-session Capesize drop as noise until a second negative print confirms otherwise.

What We Are Watching

• Whether Capesize’s 278-point drop is a single-session correction or the start of something deeper. One red session after a multi-week run higher is not unusual; a second one alongside a rising ballaster count would be a different signal entirely.
• Monday’s Oman meeting on Hormuz. Any concrete outcome, or the lack of one, will move Brent well before it moves delivered bunker prices — charterers should expect the bunker market to lag whichever way this breaks.
• The Week 38 Baltic Exchange roundup, due next week, for whether C3 and C5 followed the BCI lower into Friday’s close or held closer to the week’s high-$18s and $42 prints.
• Panamax’s three-session soft patch against the still-lengthening Atlantic tonnage list flagged in the Week 37 report.
• The Fujairah-Rotterdam VLSFO spread, now $80.50/mt, for whether it holds or narrows as this week’s crude move works through delivered prices at all three ports.

Sources and dating: Baltic indices and average daily earnings — close of 10 September 2026 via handybulk.com/baltic-dry-index (most recent dated entry on the page at time of writing). Bunker prices — close of 11 September 2026 via shipandbunker.com (world prices, cross-checked against the Singapore, Rotterdam and Fujairah port history pages). C3 and C5 route commentary and the BCI 182 5TC week-end print — Baltic Exchange Weekly Roundup, Bulk report Week 37, published 11 September 2026 and covering 7-11 September 2026; the report describes C3 and C5 as ranges rather than single closing prints, and the figures used in the banner ($41.00/mt and $17.90/mt) are representative of those stated ranges rather than exact quoted fixtures. Brent crude — $104.61/bbl, -2.81%, live quote 12 September 2026, 13:14 GMT+3 via bloomberght.com. Piraeus bunker prices are not carried on the Ship and Bunker world price page and are therefore not quoted. No estimated or interpolated figures are used for the Baltic, bunker or Brent data points themselves.