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Brent Crude hits $119.56/barrel peak today
- mullingitover 6mo agoWhen you google "whistling past the graveyard" you get a screenshot of the stock market performance for the past month.
- outside2344 6mo agoThis is going to work until all of the sudden it doesn't.
- ajross 6mo agoWhich is to say, it's a speculative bubble and it will burst on its own schedule and for essentially arbitrary reasons and not due to the economic fundamentals of the industries involved. Which... is something we all basically knew even before the Iran boondoggle. The market is as the market does.
- fn-mote 6mo ago> … for essentially arbitrary reasons and not due to the economic fundamentals … When I think about the impact of the war on Iran, it’s pretty clearly affecting “economic fundamentals”. So what are you talking about?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- nsvd2 6mo agoThey're saying that SPY is up 12% over the past month despite the Iran war. The stock market is not the economy.
- nagaiaida 6mo agodecidedly off topic but since i've stumbled across you again, i'm still over here wondering what the hell you meant a couple months ago by arguing that doing bare syscalls on linux from a forth is an emulator. it was quite perplexing to be called a sovcit who was imagining some software i've written just because it was rhetorically inconvenient for you that said software existed
- tim333 6mo agoThe typical investor algorithm is timing the market or analysing stocks doesn't work so keep buying index funds. That can go on and on unless people run out of money to buy with.
- dzhiurgis 6mo ago"This time it's different"
- ryandvm 6mo agoY'all remember COVID? Everything shut down for 6 months and somehow miraculously the economy just sort of chugged along without much shock until about 2 years later when all the consequences of the COVID aid/stimulus came home to roost. That is exactly how this will play out.
- mullingitover 6mo agoThis isn't a pandemic, this is an energy crisis (and everything didn't 'shut down for six months' during the pandemic anyway). The historical events you'll want to look back on are the 1973, 1979, and 2022 energy shocks. Combine them all: this is worse. This isn't my hot take either, it's the opinion of the International Energy Agency[1]. Even if peace breaks out right now, the world economy is going to take years to recover. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/07/oil-prices-donald-trump-iran-stock-market-imf-inflation https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/07/oil-prices-...
- testbjjl 6mo agoLooks like many could be siloed this summer given the increase in fuel prices across the board. That could also be a downward drag on many industries. Even if we were able to get back to where we were 2 months ago today, there would still be noticeable, non-zero impact.
- idontwantthis 6mo agoWhat do you mean by siloed?
- kurthr 6mo agoNot traveling or going on vacation.
- ortusdux 6mo agoLimited in their options. Americans tend to use more gasoline in the summer https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mgfupus2&f=m https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...
- amarcheschi 6mo agoWhy? Isn't it the opposite in Europe?
- hatthew 6mo agoMy guess is the stark difference in type of cars, number of cars, typical miles driven, and public transport. A standard american's road trip vacation would be unusual in europe. For example, my relative visits family several times a year, doing 4 hour drive in a large pickup truck for a short weekend trip. In europe, my understanding is that destinations are likely to be closer, cars are smaller, and trains are common (maybe the default?).
- amarcheschi 6mo ago
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- outside2344 6mo agoStarting to spike in certain states as well: https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2026/04/13/michigan-gas-prices-rising-donald-trump-economy/89588132007/ https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2026/04/13/m...
- sleepyguy 6mo agoThat's just the futures price. If you wanted to buy it, you would be paying $140 plus.There is a growing divergence between futures pricing and actual real world price.
- lokar 6mo agoAnd getting even worse for end use commodities
- mil22 6mo agoThe actual real world price for immediate delivery is called the spot price. The price of the future is just the price for a contract to have it delivered on a certain date. Spot prices: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_spt_s1_d.htm https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_spt_s1_d.htm Futures prices: https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts/ https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts/
- tialaramex 6mo agoAs I understand it, Oil Futures come in two varieties, one kind result in you actually taking the oil when they happen, which is why that negative price craziness years back because if you're holding the futures and haven't got anywhere to put that oil that's a problem for you. The other kind though is some sort of cash equivalent, I guess maybe it resolves to the current spot price or something at the moment it stops being a future ? So, for these mispriced Futures, what happens? If I buy $1M of Brent Crude futures and then just wait, and when my futures resolve that much Brent Crude would be worth $1.5M at spot prices do I... get $1.5M and somebody in the oil industry just lost their shirt? Do they just ship me enough Brent Crude to sell it for $1.5M at spot prices? What if they were lying and they can't deliver ?
- mil22 6mo agoYes, there are physically settled and cash settled futures. The futures price converges to the settlement price (tied to spot) as the expiration date approaches. Futures are marked to market every day and gains and losses are paid out daily in cash. So in the example you gave, you would have received $500K profit between when you bought the futures at $1M and when they expire at $1.5M. For cash settled futures that's the end of the story - a final small adjustment happens, in cash, your position disappears, and that's it. For physically settled futures, the story is the same, but on the day of delivery, you (as the buyer) would be required to pay $1.5M cash to receive the oil, and whoever held the other side of the contract (as the seller) would be required to deliver it to you at some named location, typically a storage facility. Who loses the $500K? The seller (who was short the contract) has been paying the losses daily as the price moved against them. The payments are handled through the exchange/clearinghouse and their brokerage. What if they can't deliver? The exchange steps in and provides guarantees.
- jmyeet 6mo agoWe're not seeing the true scope of just how bad things and are going to get. There are ~9 different oil "flavors" traded in large volume in the world. The big factors are primarily API gravity [1] and sulfur content. Low sulfur content is generally better but the sulfur is extracted into necessary products (primarily fertilizer). Likewise, the API gravity favors higher gravity, which actually means lighter crude. So when you see terms like "sweet, light crude" "sweet" means "low sulfur content" and "light" is high gravity. But heavier crude still has applications like building roads. Oil is traded on futures markets. A futures contract is standardized for the type of oil, standard amounts (typically 1000 barrels per contract) and a delivery date. This allows producers to forward sell oil and consumers to forward buy it, both of which are just hedging price risk. The price you see publicly is the future price. What isn't public is the spot or physical price. Historically those tracked each other. They have diverged in the last 2 months by upards of $40/barrel [2]. We've seen Dubai oil trade at $180+/barrel physical and Brent is really at more like $140-150. Nobody in the know or in the business trusts the futures prices anymore. This can happen in what's called a market of extreme backwardation. That simply means the spot prices are higher than the future price. The market seems to believe the supplies are currently constrainted but the Strait will be reopened in the short term. This is likely overly optimistic. On a side note we saw extreme market backwardation in the silver market in late 2025 where again the paper (future) price was a lie and refiners were buying at the supposed spot price so different circumstances to this. The second issue is that there have been record releases from strategic reserves to try and stabilize prices [3]. Even so, stockpiles are dwindling of both crude and refined products like avgas and gasoline. Lastly, if the Strait opened tomorrow it's likely going to take years for oil to reach pre-war price levels and a lot of the problems over the next year or more are already baked in. A whole bunch of harvests have missed being fertilized so you will likely find that tens of millions of people are going to suffer from famine regardless of what happens now. A lot of professionals are coming to the realization that financial markets are in denial about how bad this is and are going to be (eg [4]). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API_gravity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API_gravity [2]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-interpret-wartime-oil-prices https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-interpret-wartime-oil-pric... [3]: https://www.iea.org/news/iea-member-countries-to-carry-out-largest-ever-oil-stock-release-amid-market-disruptions-from-middle-east-conflict https://www.iea.org/news/iea-member-countries-to-carry-out-l... [4]: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Is-Reality-Finally-Catching-Up-With-Financial-Markets.html https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Is-Reality-Finall...
- gdulli 6mo agoIf this is what winning a war looks like I hope we don't ever lose one.
- jcranmer 6mo agoThe markets are definitely underestimating the impact of the Strait of Hormuz closure. I've heard a couple of different theories why, but the best one seems to be that too many traders were burned by overestimating the impact of COVID on the markets, and so now they're overcompensating by underestimating the impact of the energy sector's worst nightmare. And I don't think the markets are going to properly react to the situation until everything goes absolutely haywire. The closure of the strait has cut off 10-20% of global crude oil supply. We're at the point in the shutdown where all of the transit before the closure has arrived, which means the effect of the supply shock is now that refineries are draining all of their inventories. That means that 10-20% of demand for refined petroleum products will have to pretty sharpish be destroyed. And while people are definitely prepared to understand the impact on things like gasoline for cars or jet fuel for planes, the reality will also include scenarios like "sorry, can't buy milk anymore because no more plastic for milk jugs." COVID-induced supply shortages broke many people; the coming oil-starved supply shortages are probably going to be at least as bad. And the real kicker is that, even if you wave a magic wand and reopened the Strait of Hormuz tomorrow, mothballed wells and refineries will take many months to spin back up to full production, just from mothballing. And some of them have been struck as military targets, which will take years to get back to full capacity. I think around 10% of world total LNG capacity is offline until 2027 if not 2028 for that reason alone.
- arctics 6mo agoprice shocks don't cause inflation, printing money does.
- pizzathyme 6mo agoI’m going to bookmark this and check back periodically this year to see if I am truly not able to buy milk due to plastic. Interesting prediction.
- hatthew 6mo agoI don't think that was a specific prediction, but rather an illustration of the type of impact oil shortages could have. I'm curious if people have more specific predictions about what products/services will be affected more than a layperson would expect.
- expedition32 6mo agoThe Netherlands dodged the 1970s oil embargo because of Shell and their relationship with apartheid South Africa and apparently we're the only country in Europe that has refineries that produces kerosene. Evil always wins.
- sidewndr46 6mo agoThis means the economy is up right?
- treebeard901 6mo agoCalifornia and other western states could see 1970s style rationing and increasing prices within the next few weeks...