The nine narrow places trade cannot avoid.
Ninety percent of world trade travels by sea and almost all of it funnels through a handful of gaps narrow enough to see across. We tracked daily transits at nine of them from January 2024 to September 2026.
The gates do not fail quietly.
Read the nine together and one rule holds. Traffic denied at one gate does not disappear, it reappears somewhere else within weeks, and the second gate is almost never built for it. Hormuz lost two thirds of its traffic in 2026. We have recent Houthi rebel resurgance in Mokha, Yemen effectively slowing Bab El-Mandeb further. The Cape of Good Hope is the only reasonable, yet expensive, alternative. The Bosporus increased transits nearly threefold mainly due to shadow fleet rerouting. Every geopolitical event or weather anomaly has a corresponding impact to all nine major chokepoints.
| Chokepoint | 2024 | 2025 | 2025 vs 2024 | 2026 | 2026 vs 2024 | Dominant stress |
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Two ways to stop reading about it and start watching it.
Everything in this piece came out of the same platform our customers use every day. Pick the question you actually need answered.
I need to see what is moving.
Live and historical vessel movement, zone by zone, with the transit counts, dark gaps, and traffic shifts behind every number above. Build your own chokepoint watch and get told when the pattern breaks.
I need to know who I am dealing with.
A single transparency score per vessel, built from behaviour, ownership, flag history, and sanctions exposure. Screen a counterparty before the fixture, not after the cargo is loaded.