Airlines Cancel Riyadh Flights Following Houthi Airport Strikes

Airlines are canceling scheduled flights to Riyadh after Houthi forces struck two airports in Saudi Arabia, Bloomberg News reported. The strikes killed three people and injured dozens, marking an immediate physical escalation in Middle East airspace security and forcing international carriers to pull routes into the kingdom. The energy and rates channels reacted without waiting for details. Front-month Brent crude futures pushed 4.42% higher to $104.63 a barrel on our tape, while WTI crude jumped 4.5% to $92.25. The move compounds an oil rally that The Associated Press and Alliance News tracked climbing past $103 from late Wednesday levels near $101.77. The spike in energy directly pressures borrowing benchmarks: the 10-year Treasury yield rose to 5.29% on our tape, having touched 5.33% earlier, according to Morningstar. That combination of crude strength and rising yields lands squarely on an equity book that had already lost its footing. The tech tape is operating under defensive posture: QQQ sits at 753.02, trading beneath its 753.16 gamma flip. Once an underlying slips under that boundary, dealers stop acting as shock absorbers and hedge in the direction of the trend, widening intraday swings instead of muting them. The expected move on the Nasdaq-100 tracker sits at ±0.99%, with the 750 put wall serving as the immediate structural floor. Small caps are even deeper in that regime. IWM trades at 276.24, well below its 278.27 flip, leaving dealers holding short gamma as spot approaches the 275 put wall. The only index asset retaining positive net positioning is SPY, trading at 775.22 against a 774.97 flip. With oil running above $104 and the VIX up 2.72% at 15.49, the headline shock exposes an equity surface where two of the three major index books are already positioned to press declines.