Commodities Outlook 2026

WTI printed $81.61 on July 17, up 13.98% over seven days and 8.39% over 30. Brent's July 13 close was $81.62 after a 17.34% weekly gain. Our July 13 macro state recorded WTI at 73.96 and described the $78 gate, the level that converts our oil view from neutral to bullish, as sitting 5.5% above spot. Spot is now on the far side of it.

The formal upgrade requires three sessions above the line, so the label on the view still reads neutral. What sits underneath the label has already moved. The July 7 tanker strike in the Strait of Hormuz pushed the energy-shock scenario weight in our book from 15 to 20, and our June 30 reporting explained why quota policy cannot cap this move: OPEC+ raised its July allocation by 188,000 barrels a day, the fourth increase since April, into a strait that remains largely closed, adding paper supply a blocked chokepoint cannot deliver.

The base of this rally matters as much as its slope. Even after the weekly jump, Brent's July 13 close stood 31.23% below its level of 90 days earlier, and WTI trades in the lower half of a 52-week range that tops out at 117.28. A premium rebuilt this fast from a base this depleted was exactly the violent-repricing risk our oil thesis flagged while crude was still falling. Nothing about a 13.98% week says the repricing is finished.

Gold traded at $4013.6 on July 17, down 2.62% over seven days, 6.38% over 30 days and 17.75% over 90. Our July 13 state marked 4,050 to 4,100 as the add zone, the range where the standing discipline was to buy weakness, and kept the view bullish at moderate conviction largely because price had finally entered it. Price has since left through the floor.

That state also wrote down its own tripwire: a third consecutive decline, with real yields still below 2.40% and the Hormuz premium intact, would cut gold to low conviction and confirm the emerging thesis that the hedge premium is leaking out of the metal. Each clause of that sentence has aged badly for the bulls. Gold had already fallen 0.98% into July 13 on a day crude rose 3.57%, its second straight decline. Spot now sits below the 4,073.5 that state recorded: over the seven days to July 17, gold lost 2.62% while WTI gained 13.98%, both on the same live window.

The bull case has not been refuted so much as ignored. Real yields printed 2.31% in that state, under the 2.40% level that breaks the thesis mechanically. Realized CPI of 4.25% against a 2.24% breakeven still argues for owning an inflation hedge, and the stagflation scenario still carries 35% of the mapped weight. Gold is falling anyway, into precisely the news mix it exists to insure. Either it is being sold for liquidity, the charitable reading our state offered, or the market has decided geopolitical risk is worth less to gold than the framework assumed. The last positioning read, from July 7, had gold uncrowded at the 40th percentile, and the state itself flagged that number as stale, which means the least bad explanation is also the one nobody can currently verify.

Mostly, yes. Step through the table and the rally narrows to a single column. Henry Hub gas fell 13.98% over the seven days to its July 13 print, to $2.83, within sight of the $2.54 floor of its 52-week range, and the June reading for European gas, at $15.092 per MMBtu, sat 14.59% below its level of 90 days earlier. Inside energy itself, the bid belongs to the barrel alone.

Agriculture is deflating outright. The June vintage, the latest available for the global series, shows wheat down 9.61% on the month, soybean meal down 8.05%, soybeans down 5.6% and sugar down 5.84%, the last of those to the very bottom of its 52-week range. Coffee's June print sits exactly at its 52-week low as well. Cocoa is the exception, up 6.09% on the month and 35.6% over 90 days, though from a depressed base: even after that run, the June level remains far beneath its 52-week high.

Iron ore extends the soft-demand story into metals, down 7.02% in the June data to within a few dollars of its 52-week low. Copper is the dissenter, and an important one, with its June print at the very top of its 52-week range after an 8.17% 90-day gain.

Composition is the point. A Hormuz premium raises inflation through one narrow channel, fuel, and that channel is already reaching consumers: US retail gasoline rose 2.07% in the week to July 13, to $3.855 a gallon, even with a 30-day change of -7.02%. Food inputs are pulling the other way. A stagflation scare built on crude alone is thinner, and more reversible, than one the whole complex confirms, which is why the de-escalation path our state tracks is the threat that matters most to the July repricing.

The cleanest cycle signal left in the complex is the split between its two bellwether metals. Copper's June print sits at the top of its 52-week range after an 8.17% 90-day gain; gold, priced live, has lost 17.75% over its own 90-day window. Those series carry different vintages, the copper data ends June 1, so the ratio cannot be computed to the decimal. Its direction is not in doubt: the metal that prices growth is at a high while the metal that prices fear retreats. A rising copper/gold ratio argues directly against the growth-scare scenario our macro state already cut to a 10% weight, and it says the contested leg of the stagflation debate is inflation, not activity.

Three questions settle the rest of the month. First, whether WTI holds $78 for the three sessions the framework demands, turning a price event into a formal bullish call. Second, whether OPEC+ keeps adding quota into a closed strait, our June 30 reporting counted four increases since April, or concedes that barrels which cannot ship anchor nothing. Third, whether gold stops falling: the July 13 state said a reclaim of 4,100 would kill the leaking-hedge thesis, and from $4013.6 that reclaim is a test the bulls have to pass rather than a formality.

The dollar, for once, is not on the list. Our July 13 state had DXY at 100.923, mid-range in its 99-103 band for a third straight cycle, neither headwind nor tailwind. The barrel is not waiting for the dollar's permission this month, and nothing else in the table has earned a vote.