Tanker freight gained 20% as crude fell 4% and the S&P 500 went nowhere
In the week ended Friday, September 18, 2026, Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF BWET rose 20% while WTI crude fell 4.0% and S&P 500 ETF SPY lost 0.1% after the Fed raised rates to 3.75%–4.00%.
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Last week the bill for moving oil jumped 44%. This week the barrel got cheaper, Schlumberger fell 8.8%, and Amplify's tanker-freight fund still closed Friday at $872.14. The S&P 500 ETF SPY lost 0.1% from last Friday's close through Friday, September 18. The Federal Reserve raised its target range a quarter point to 3.75%–4.00%, the 10-year yield finished at 5.01%, and the index treated all of it as a rounding error.
Ordinary funds barely registered the split. Nasdaq-100 ETF QQQ added 0.9%. Russell 2000 ETF IWM lost 1.4%, developed-market ETF EFA lost 1.6%, and emerging-market ETF EEM lost 1.2%. Aggregate-bond ETF AGG was flat. The ranking of unleveraged U.S.-listed funds drops leveraged, inverse and sub-floor products. Tanker freight led it. Three genomics stocks, a Strategy options fund, and a Friday in crypto filled out the rest of the top of the board.
Tanker freight rose as crude and oil services fell
Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF BWET does not own tanker stocks. It holds forward freight agreements on the Middle East-to-China very-large-crude-carrier route, plus a smaller West Africa-to-Europe book, and it charges 3.5% to do it. With Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline still shut, Aramco has been loading at Ras Tanura and handing the crude off via ship-to-ship transfer at Sohar, just outside the Strait of Hormuz. That workaround uses a shuttle tanker for the Gulf leg and a second vessel for the voyage to China, so the same barrels occupy more ships. The Baltic Exchange's TD3C rate for a 270,000-ton Middle East-to-China VLCC stood at $862,150 a day last Friday and $1.099 million by Tuesday. From last Friday's $726.92 close the fund advanced in three of five sessions, including 11% on Friday, and finished at a 52-week high. It is the same trade as last week's 44%.
West Texas Intermediate crude did the opposite. It peaked at $105.83 on Tuesday, after the overland bypass around the strait stayed shut following drone strikes. It closed Friday at $96.08, down 4.0% for the week and 5.7% on Friday alone, as those ship-to-ship transfers kept oil moving. The scare left the price. It did not leave the voyage.
Oil-service equities went with the barrel, not the freight. iShares U.S. Oil Equipment & Services ETF IEZ lost 5.4%, VanEck Oil Services ETF OIH lost 5.2%, and SPDR S&P Oil & Gas Equipment & Services ETF XES lost 5.0%.
Tanker freight diverged from crude and oil services
- BWET · 872.14
- WTI · 96.08
- IEZ · 28.06
Schlumberger, a 20% weight in OIH, accounted for 1.8 percentage points of that decline. Baker Hughes, TechnipFMC and Halliburton filled in the rest. If you held oil services as a proxy for tanker freight, the week treated them as different assets, because they are.
ARK genomics, led by Twist, Tempus and Schrödinger
ARK Genomic Revolution ETF ARKG, Cathie Wood's $1.56 billion active genomics fund, rose 13.3%. SPDR S&P Biotech ETF XBI rose 0.3%.
ARKG pulled away from the biotech benchmark
- ARKG · 51.64
- XBI · 156.72
Twist Bioscience, an 8.9% weight and a synthetic-DNA company, rose 31% across all five sessions and added 2.8 percentage points. Tempus AI, an 8.6% weight in AI diagnostics, rose 32% and added another 2.8 percentage points; the stock jumped 15% on Thursday. Schrödinger, a 2.7% position in drug-discovery software, rose 53%, including 26% on Thursday, and contributed 1.4 percentage points. Together those three names accounted for 7.0 percentage points, about half the fund's move. 10x Genomics, the top holding at 9.6%, rose a more ordinary 12%.
Hyperliquid funds and Strategy option income
Bitwise Hyperliquid ETF BHYP, which holds the HYPE token, rose 14.6%. 21Shares Hyperliquid ETF THYP rose 14.5%. Grayscale Hyperliquid Staking ETF HYPG rose 14.4%. That is one trade in three wrappers. All three sold off more than 5% on Tuesday, recovered Thursday, and then jumped 11% on Friday, the session that made the week.
iShares Bitcoin Trust IBIT rose 5.1% over the same five sessions and 6.3% on Friday, as bitcoin moved back above $80,000. Hyperliquid's listed funds outran that by a wide margin. Strategy, the bitcoin-treasury company formerly named MicroStrategy, rose 17.5% for the week and 16.4% on Friday, when a new Securities and Exchange Commission path for tokenized stock trading hit the same group of names.
YieldMax MSTR Option Income Strategy ETF MSTY, a $962 million fund that sells calls against Strategy to produce weekly income, rose 14.2%. It captured most of the stock's week. YieldMax MSTR Short Option Income Strategy ETF WNTR is the other side of that overlay. It fell 14.3%, 13% of it on Friday, and was the week's worst unleveraged fund. The long wrapper is 14 times the size of the short one.
REX-Osprey SOL + Staking ETF SSK looks, on a weekly screen, like another crypto winner at 12.3%. The fund was slightly lower through Thursday. Friday's 13.7% jump, the same session Solana funds gained 13% as bitcoin reclaimed $80,000, produced the entire gain.
Turkey and U.S. banks
The week's other damage sat in a short Strategy overlay, a Turkey redemption run, the oil-service funds that were not a proxy for the voyage, and U.S. banks on the Fed's hike day.
iShares MSCI Turkey ETF TUR lost 7.8%, and 6.6% of that came on Wednesday, when Turkish asset managers failed to meet redemption requests and investors withdrew about $1 billion from local funds. Volume in TUR jumped to 801,000 shares that session from 82,000 the Friday before. Thursday recovered 4.2%. It did not repair the week.
Invesco KBW Bank ETF KBWB, a $6.69 billion fund of U.S. money-center and regional banks, lost 4.9%. Bank of America fell 7.9%. Goldman Sachs fell 8.5%. Wednesday, when Chairman Warsh's FOMC raised the funds rate, the fund fell 2.9%. The 10-year yield ended Friday at 5.01%, two days after the hike. Long-Treasury ETF TLT still eked out 0.5% for the week, most of it in Thursday's bounce. Bank stocks did not.
The East-West pipeline is still shut. Two double-digit freight weeks have now stacked on the same closed pipe, 44% then 20%, while the barrel cheapened and oil-service equities fell with it. The question going into next week is what these rates do if the pipeline reopens, and who is still on the other side of that contract.
Frequently asked
Why did tanker freight rise while crude fell?
A shut Saudi pipeline forced Aramco to move barrels by ship-to-ship transfer outside the Strait of Hormuz, so the same oil occupies more vessels even as the barrel itself got cheaper.
Does the tanker fund hold shipping stocks?
No, it holds forward freight agreements on the Middle East-to-China VLCC route plus a smaller West Africa-to-Europe book, and charges 3.5%.
Did oil-service funds follow the freight rally?
No, they followed the barrel down, with the U.S. oil equipment and services fund losing 5.4% as Schlumberger, Baker Hughes, TechnipFMC and Halliburton fell.
What drove the ARK genomics gain?
Twist Bioscience, Tempus AI and Schrödinger together accounted for about half the fund's move, most of it on Thursday.