Commodities desk · Morning edition · Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Houthi attacks on Saudi Aramco pushed crude to 95.37 a barrel, though diesel and natural gas gave back yesterday's spike instead of following it higher.
Prices in this edition were taken live, not from stored closes. They were read at the Morning edition slot on Wednesday, October 14, 2026. Anything named as a cause may come from a headline the desk was given.
Energy still sets today's pace, but the engine switched overnight from refined products to crude itself. WTI climbed to 95.37 dollars a barrel as Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and fresh strikes on Aramco facilities revived fears of a Gulf supply disruption, while Brent barely moved. The diesel and natural gas spike that drove the last edition reversed hard, both giving back a day's gains, so the story this morning runs through the Strait of Hormuz and Saudi coastline rather than the refineries.
Away from the oil fields, softs did the moving: coffee rose 3.13% and cotton climbed 2.05%, both breaking clear of the range they held through most of October, with no headline here naming what shifted demand. In Namibia, a foot-and-mouth outbreak among cattle has pushed the European Union to suspend meat imports even as US live cattle futures sat almost exactly flat. Metals told a steadier retreat, silver falling 3.66% against gold's 1.26% slide, with platinum and palladium easing too, a quieter but still broad pullback.
With September's inflation already confirmed running at 3.7% and oil now climbing on a supply scare rather than easing, the read for anyone holding real assets as a hedge against rising prices is genuinely split today. Crude's gain argues one way, metals' broad retreat argues the other, and cocoa's own gain sits atop a choppy run rather than a clean trend. That split, not a single direction, is the honest commodities story heading into the rest of the week.
- WTI crude rose 1.31% to 95.37 a barrel as Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and fresh strikes on Aramco facilities revived Gulf supply fears.
- Natural gas fell 0.94% and diesel eased 0.63%, both giving back a day's sharp gains even as storage sits 0.2% below the seasonal normal.
- Taiwan's agreement to buy 30% of the Alaska LNG project's output, per Trump's announcement, marks a new demand line for US gas exports.
- Silver sank 3.66% to 57.34, falling nearly three times as fast as gold's 1.26% drop, a sharp reversal of its recent run against bullion.
- Gold eased to 4,124.70, extending its pullback, while platinum fell 1.93% and palladium 0.88% as the broader metals complex retreated.
- Copper slipped a mild 0.27%, holding closer to flat than its shinier peers, a comparatively steady growth read today.
- Cocoa rose 1.64% today but remains below the level first flagged two editions ago, a choppy climb rather than a clean trend.
- Live cattle held almost flat, and for Namibia's livestock farmers facing the EU's suspension of meat imports over a foot-and-mouth outbreak, that calm masks a real trade loss.
- Coffee jumped 3.13% and cotton climbed 2.05%, both breaking out of the range they'd held through most of October.
- WTI's gain against Brent's near-flat move narrowed the usual gap between the two benchmarks for a session.
- Diesel's retreat against crude's rise pulls back some of the refined-product gap that widened sharply a day earlier.
- Silver's 3.66% drop outpacing gold's 1.26% flips the gold-silver relationship further toward gold after days the other way.
- The jumped 3.67% to 15.83, up from the 14.84 first flagged on October 9, a real if modest climb in volatility.
- Only 38% of tracked indices sit above their 50-day average even as 75% remain above their 200-day average, a split read on underlying momentum.
- Real assets gave a mixed inflation signal today, oil higher on supply fear, metals broadly lower, no single hedge story holding across the complex.
Silver's slide to 57.35 is its steepest daily drop in this stretch, pulling it further from September's near-66 peak.
Coffee's jump to 301.85 breaks it clear of the sideways band it held since late September.
Cotton's climb to 82.16 extends its rebound from early October's near two-year low near 74.
The numbers behind it
Top to bottom: Upstream driver, Commodity, Where it goes
- Upstream driver
- Physical flow
- Divergence
Every move here is measured between two stored daily closes, so the reading belongs to a session rather than to a time of day. This block is cut at the 2026-10-14 session. Anything named as a driver comes from a stored series and never from a headline.
- Broad Commodities (DBC)33.48USD+0.45%
- Brent Crude Oil106.65USD/bbl+1.84%2026-10-12
- WTI Crude Oil93.74USD/bbl+2.06%2026-10-12
- Natural Gas3.167USD/MMBtu-1.65%2026-10-12
- Brent Crude Oil and WTI Crude OilDivergenceBrent against WTI: +1.84% against +2.06% today, and the spread between them sits 1.5 standard deviations from its own average over the last 60 stored sessions.
- US Gulf Coast temperature100th percentileUS Gulf Coast temperature sits in the 100th percentile of the same calendar window in earlier years, much hotter than typical for the time of year, for the window ending 2026-10-08.2026-10-08
- US natural gas in storage+2.5%US natural gas in storage is 3,500 BCF for the week ending 2026-10-02, +2.5% against 3,415 in the prior published week.2026-10-02
- Gasolinefrom Brent Crude Oil
- Dieselfrom Brent Crude Oil
- Fertilizerfrom Natural Gas
- Gold4,190.60USD/oz-0.61%2026-10-12
- Silver60.141USD/oz-0.87%2026-10-12
Go deeper
The Commodities desk's own dashboard: what is moving, why, and where it goes next. Open it
The desk voices are written by AI, not by human reporters. Every figure is taken from the listed market, sensor and headline data, and an automated check flags any figure or quoted source that is not.