Brent crude slid toward $95 a barrel and European bourses opened firmer on Saturday as traders priced in a smooth start to the Doha prisoner exchange, the most concrete test yet of the four-day-old Iran-Israel ceasefire and the latest piece of evidence underpinning what desks have begun to call the “de-escalation trade.”

Brent for June delivery touched an intraday low of $95.12 in London before steadying at $95.80, down $1.40 on the session and more than 23% below its late-March peak above $125. West Texas Intermediate slipped under $91 for the first time since the opening week of the war. The move extended a five-session retreat that has erased almost the entire risk premium that built up between the start of strikes in early March and the OPEC+ supply hike on April 1.

Equity markets, which trade only thinly on Saturdays, were quieter, but Gulf bourses, which run on a Sunday-through-Thursday cycle and were closed for the weekend, are expected to extend their week-long rally when they reopen. The Tadawul in Riyadh finished Thursday at a four-month high, with Saudi Aramco within 2% of its pre-war level. Tel Aviv’s TA-35, which traded Friday on its short week, closed up 1.8% at a record, led by banks and insurers.

The Doha handover, which began at dawn local time at a hangar on the perimeter of Hamad International Airport, saw Iran release roughly 40 detained foreigners, including dual nationals from the United States, Britain, Germany and Australia, alongside the remains of nine U.S. service members killed in the early phase of the war. In exchange, the United States and Israel released a smaller group of Iranian and Hezbollah-affiliated detainees, including two Quds Force officers captured in northern Iraq in mid-March. The exchange was mediated by Qatar and witnessed by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“The market needed to see this go off without a hitch, and so far it has,” said John Reilly, head of commodities strategy at Citi in London. “The ceasefire is one thing on paper. The choreography of an actual prisoner swap, with cameras present and senior officials in the room, is the kind of confidence-building event that lets risk managers reset their hedges. We think $95 holds as a near-term floor, with $92 plausible by the end of the month if observers in Hormuz continue to report nothing.”

Shipping markets continued their faster-than-equities normalization. The Baltic Dirty Tanker Index closed Friday down another 6%, taking the cumulative decline since the ceasefire announcement on April 12 to roughly 22%. War-risk insurance premiums on tankers crossing the Strait of Hormuz, which had touched 2.5% of hull value at the height of the conflict, were quoted Friday at 0.7%, according to a circular from the marine broker Howden. Several Greek and Norwegian owners that had diverted vessels around the Cape of Good Hope said they would resume Suez and Bab el-Mandeb routing from Monday, conditional on continued quiet from Houthi forces in Yemen.

That qualifier matters. A single Houthi launch on Thursday night, the second since the ceasefire took effect, was intercepted by a Saudi Patriot battery near Jazan and condemned within hours by Tehran, which described the action as “outside the framework of the Islamabad understanding.” A separate rocket fired from a militia position in eastern Iraq landed in open desert near the Jordanian border, prompting a brief Israeli air patrol but no return fire. Analysts said the muted response in oil prices to both incidents was itself a signal.

“Two months ago, either of those events would have put a $4 or $5 bid into Brent inside an hour,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the consultancy Eurasia Levant. “On Friday, the market shrugged. That tells you the ceasefire framework is being treated as durable until proven otherwise. The cost of that confidence is that any genuine breakdown would now produce a much sharper repricing.”

Currency and rates markets reflected the same drift. The dollar index closed Friday at its lowest level since late January, with the yen and Swiss franc giving back the last of their wartime haven bid. Gold, which traded above $2,520 an ounce on April 9, finished the week at $2,378, down nearly 6% from the peak. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield ended Friday at 4.33%, eight basis points above its pre-ceasefire low, as investors continued to rotate out of safe assets and into cyclicals.

Energy executives offered a mixed read. At a closed-door briefing in Houston on Friday, the chief executive of one large independent refiner told clients that crack spreads were normalizing faster than crude, and that diesel margins in particular were “back to a recognizable shape.” A senior trader at a European integrated major, speaking on condition of anonymity, said cargo flows out of Basra and Kharg Island had been steady through the week, with no requests for war-clause invocations on contracts loading after April 15.

OPEC+ ministers, who met by video link on Friday afternoon, issued a brief statement reaffirming the April 1 production increase and signaling that the alliance would “monitor conditions” before considering any reversal. Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, in remarks to state television in Riyadh, said the group’s objective was “an orderly market, not a particular price,” and rejected suggestions that the kingdom would seek to defend the $90 level if fundamentals pointed lower.

The week ahead will test the trade. Earnings season in the U.S. moves into its busiest stretch, with Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and ExxonMobil among more than 150 S&P 500 companies reporting before May 1. Strategists at Goldman Sachs wrote in a Friday note that they expected guidance to reflect lingering first-quarter fuel-cost pressure, particularly on airlines, trucking and chemicals, even as the second-quarter outlook brightens. The bank kept its year-end S&P 500 target at 6,400 and raised its end-of-year Brent forecast to $88 from $84.

A second prisoner-exchange tranche, focused on civilian detainees held in Iraq and Syria, is expected within ten days, according to a senior Western diplomat in Doha. Officials said additional steps on the Hormuz monitoring regime and on the staged withdrawal of U.S. Navy assets from the eastern Mediterranean would be announced in the coming week.