Commodities Wrap 13 October: Heating Oil Leads at 4.67 Percent as the Crude Benchmarks Split
The crude benchmarks split on Tuesday, with Brent 0.86 percent below Monday’s settlement at 105.73 dollars a barrel by the 19:04 GMT reading and WTI 0.47 percent above its own at 94.18. The two went on to settle at 105.69 and 94.14 dollars, WTI’s highest close since 24 September, on Reuters’ updated report. Heating oil’s 4.67 percent rise led the seventeen tracked contracts, with diesel prices at record highs across much of the world on Reuters’ account. Gold’s December contract settled 0.3 percent lower at 4,177.30 dollars an ounce ahead of Wednesday’s US inflation report. Six of the seventeen stood above Monday’s settlements at our reading.
Diesel sets the records while the benchmarks disagree about Russia
Reuters’ oil report had the market mixed, with Brent down 0.6 percent at 106.06 dollars by its 16:59 GMT prices and WTI up 0.8 percent at 94.47, on track for its highest close since 24 September for a second day after Brent settled Monday at its highest since 15 September. The supply side of the session was Russian: the Kremlin said on Tuesday it saw no direct link between the agreement on exporting Russian diesel to the US and its own stance on the Ukraine talks, commenting on a Reuters report that President Donald Trump’s envoys had told Ukrainian officials the deal was part of an attempt to draw Russia back into negotiations, and Russia separately said its diesel exports may exceed the volumes Trump announced. Trump said the Russian diesel was for the rest of the world, not the US. The product itself told the other half: the report had diesel prices at record highs in many parts of the world in recent weeks, on supply disruptions linked to Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure and Iran’s attacks on Middle East energy infrastructure, and our heating oil row led the whole panel, with natural gas 4.33 percent higher beside it and gasoline 1.51 percent lower. The war kept feeding the other side of the scale: the Houthis said Saudi Arabia was attacking Sanaa on Tuesday after a Saudi-led coalition warned civilians away from an oil depot on the city’s outskirts, Trump accused the militia of deliberately driving up oil prices ahead of the US midterm elections, and tanker attacks near the Strait of Hormuz stayed in focus. OPEC’s monthly report, out Tuesday, had OPEC+ September output rising sharply on Saudi Arabia, cut the 2026 demand-growth forecast for a sixth straight month, and raised next year’s on the need to rebuild inventories depleted by the Iran war.
Gold settles lower into the inflation print as every metal falls
The Reuters gold report had the December settlement 0.3 percent lower at 4,177.30 dollars and the spot price 0.3 percent lower at 4,157.90 by its 18:15 GMT reading, with the dollar slipping from its highest since April last year and the ten-year Treasury yield at its lowest in over a week. The report’s frame was the calendar: the US consumer price index on Wednesday, producer prices on Thursday, and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s last speech before the rate meeting the same day, with CME’s FedWatch tool pricing a 19 percent chance of a hike this month and an 88 percent chance by December. Fed Governor Christopher Waller said the recent rise in US bond yields reflects stronger growth rather than inflation expectations, which he called well anchored, and the IMF, in the report, flagged elevated public debt and rising yields that war-driven inflation could push higher still; Commerzbank’s analysts called rate hikes a double-edged sword for gold, raising the cost of holding it while deepening the debt concerns that support it. On the report’s spot prices silver fell 1.8 percent to 59.25 dollars, platinum 1.4 percent to 1,661.18 and palladium 1.5 percent to 1,126.95, and on our panel all five metals stood below Monday’s settlements, with silver’s fall the deepest. The softs went their own way: cocoa led agriculture at 2.22 percent, sugar followed at 1.20, and wheat’s 0.60 percent fall was the deepest grain row.
Energy
| Contract | Level | Change |
|---|---|---|
| ULSD Heating Oil, NYMEX (Nov’26), dollars a gallon | $4.944 | +4.67% |
| Natural Gas, NYMEX (Nov’26), dollars per mmBtu | $3.304 | +4.33% |
| WTI Crude, NYMEX (Nov’26), dollars a barrel | $94.18 | +0.47% |
| Brent Crude, ICE (Dec’26), dollars a barrel | $105.73 | -0.86% |
| RBOB Gasoline, NYMEX (Nov’26), dollars a gallon | $3.2421 | -1.51% |
Levels as displayed in the price feed at 19:04 GMT on Tuesday 13 October 2026, ranked by change against Monday’s settlements as carried in the feed; quotes, not settlements. The Brent and WTI settlements reported by the wire were 105.69 dollars (down 0.9 percent) and 94.14 dollars (up 0.4 percent).
Metals
| Contract | Level | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Gold, COMEX (Dec’26), dollars an ounce | $4,186.40 | -0.10% |
| Copper, COMEX (Dec’26), dollars a pound | $6.732 | -0.22% |
| Platinum, NYMEX (Jan’27), dollars an ounce | $1,674.60 | -1.12% |
| Palladium, NYMEX (Dec’26), dollars an ounce | $1,131.00 | -1.29% |
| Silver, COMEX (Dec’26), dollars an ounce | $59.54 | -1.61% |
Same read and basis, ranked by change; all five fell, and gold’s own December settlement of 4,177.30 dollars is in the lede.
Agricultural commodities
| Contract | Level | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Cocoa, ICE (Dec’26), dollars a metric ton | 5,802.00 | +2.22% |
| Sugar, ICE (Mar’27), cents a pound | 21.10 | +1.20% |
| Coffee, ICE (Dec’26), cents a pound | 293.20 | +0.89% |
| Soybeans, CBOT (Nov’26), cents a bushel | 1,282.75 | -0.39% |
| Wheat, CBOT (Dec’26), cents a bushel | 668.25 | -0.60% |
Same read and basis, five of the seven tracked rows, with corn 0.05 percent lower and cotton 0.09 lower omitted in the middle; the agriculture figures were unchanged between our three reads.
Interest, currencies, volatility and crypto
| Instrument | Level | Change |
|---|---|---|
| VIX | 15.48 | +1.78% |
| Bitcoin | $83,153.59 | +0.64% |
| Euro/Dollar | 1.1200 | +0.42% |
| Sterling/Dollar | 1.3254 | +0.36% |
| Dollar/Yen | 158.30 | -0.20% |
| US Dollar Index (DXY) | 102.19 | -0.39% |
Reference rows at the same read, ranked by change; intraday levels, with the bitcoin row the Coin Metrics dollar price as the feed carries it.
Why it matters: The war premium has moved downstream: the benchmarks disagreed about the same headlines, with the freed Russian supply weighing on Brent while WTI held its bid, but the products the refineries actually make, diesel above all, are where the records sit. OPEC cutting its demand view again while its own members pump more reads the same way, a group pricing supply fear rather than appetite. The metals told the quieter half of the night, every row lower with the dollar easing, which leaves Wednesday’s US inflation print, not the war, as gold’s next mover. And the softs ran their own race, cocoa and sugar rising through everything else.
Outlook: Our US wrap follows after the New York close, reading the day Wall Street’s reporting season opened, and it carries these four tables onward. The IEA’s Monthly Oil Market Report lands on Wednesday alongside the US consumer inflation report and China’s September inflation data, with US producer prices and remarks from Fed Chair Kevin Warsh on Thursday, as published in our Week Ahead of 11 to 17 October.
How these wraps are prepared: Methodology.
Sources: CNBC, Reuters, The Edge.
