PSX Opened Higher on the IMF Deal. It Closed Down 1,138 Points on Oil.

Pakistan's benchmark KSE-100 index spent Thursday, October 8, telling two different stories. It opened the session up 397.96 points at 168,978.36, lifted by buying in oil, gas and refinery stocks on optimism over the staff-level agreement Pakistan had just reached with the IMF a day earlier. By the close, all of that was gone and more: the index settled 1,138.50 points lower, down 0.68%, at 167,441.91.

What actually moved the market

The reversal tracks back to the Strait of Hormuz, not Islamabad. Attacks on oil tankers transiting the strait have hit their highest weekly pace of the conflict: at least 11 vessels were attacked in the week since the preceding Monday, with four of those strikes landing in the final two days before Thursday's close, and a separate tracking count put 10 tankers hit between September 28 and October 4 alone — well above the prior weekly high of six. The latest reported incident involved a tanker roughly 51 nautical miles off Qatar's northern coast, struck by multiple projectiles according to the UK Maritime Trade Operations agency, with casualties reported and details still limited as of this writing.

Traffic through the strait is thinning as a result. Only seven tankers transited on October 6, less than half the seven-day average — though US Central Command has pushed back on Iranian claims that the waterway is closed, saying commercial and energy shipping is continuing. A separate supply shock compounded the pressure: a hurricane forced the suspension of more than 510,000 barrels per day of US Gulf of Mexico crude output, adding to a reported 3.2-million-barrel weekly drawdown in US inventories. Brent crude rose as much as 5% during Thursday's session on the combined news, a sharper and faster move than the oil-driven selloffs this desk has tracked through most of 2026.

Why the IMF deal wasn't enough to hold the floor

The agreement that lifted the market at the open is real and significant — as we've covered separately, Pakistan and the IMF reached a staff-level deal on October 7 covering the fourth EFF review and third RSF review, worth roughly $1.21 billion once the Fund's Executive Board signs off. That kind of news has reliably moved the KSE-100 higher on its own this year. What Thursday showed is that it isn't enough to hold the index up against a sharp, same-day move in oil prices, which flow through to Pakistan's import bill, its refining and fertiliser sector margins, and its fuel-pricing mechanism far faster than a loan tranche that hasn't even reached the Fund's board yet.

The pattern this desk keeps tracking

This is not a new mechanism for Pakistani readers who have followed this conflict since February — it is the same one, moving faster. Oil-market volatility out of the Strait of Hormuz has been the single most consistent driver of both pump-price changes and PSX swings for most of 2026, and Thursday's session is a clean illustration: a positive domestic policy story and a negative external supply-shock story landing on the same trading day, with the external story winning. The next test is whether Brent's move holds through Friday's session or eases once markets digest how much of the current attack wave Gulf shippers are actually diverting around, which will matter more for where the KSE-100 opens next than any single IMF headline.

Build Better Pakistan's Markets Desk tracks PSX trading sessions and the oil-market and policy news that moves them.