Brent Settled at $117.64 and at $113.43. Both Are Right, and Today Only One of Them Trades.
Brent settled on Friday at $117.64 and at $113.43, both correct and $4.21 apart, because the December contract expired that day at the higher price while January — the front month this morning — closed at the lower one.
The two figures sit in adjacent sentences of one wire report, so there is no vendor disagreement to resolve and every consistency check you could run passes, which is what makes it harder to catch than a measurement error. WTI had no such ambiguity at $104.12, up $2.12 or 2.08 per cent, two-sourced across languages. For the month Brent finished 13.6 per cent higher and WTI 15.2, both at their highest since the end of April. Three secondary publishers put Brent near $115, above $116 and at $117; two of those pages returned client errors and were never opened, so we name the band and refuse to call it a finding. Oil was the second leg of a 93.4-pip round trip: a tech rout — Nasdaq down 747.73 points or 2.86 per cent, the chips index down 7.2 per cent with 29 of 30 lower, Intel down 28.58 per cent, the ten-year at 4.919 — bought yen to 156.959, then crude and two hawkish Fed speakers sold it back to 157.641. Friday also has three closing prices eight pips apart: 157.487 daily and 157.526 session from one table, 157.567 weekly from another, which makes a gap-fade rule sized off whichever arrived last nearly twice the other. And the cause will not pin down either — one tanker or two, limpet mines or naval mines, Friday or Sunday, with the only party asserting the two-mine version being the party claiming to have laid them.