Gold, the Fed and the Limits of the Lever
7 Oct 2026 Gold has lost roughly a quarter of its value since January, in the middle of a war. The explanation lies less in the Gulf than in Washington – and in a lesson first taught in 1979. A haven that stopped behaving like one Gold is supposed to rise as the world grows more dangerous. On the 221st day of the conflict between the United States and Iran, it is doing the opposite. Having touched a record of around $5,600 an ounce in late January, the metal now trades near $4,180 – roughly a quarter lower – and at the end of September it fell to a seven-week low. Writing for Investing.com this week, the analyst Satendra Singh reaches for the obvious parallel: the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and the 444 days that followed. The comparison is instructive, though not quite for the reason usually given. The crisis of 1979 was a hostage standoff, not a war. Gold surged regardless, reaching $850 an ounce on 21 January 1980. Then it fell away, and went on falling. Diplomacy did not break the rally – the hostages remained in captivity for a further year. The price of money did. The price of money On 6 October 1979 – forty-seven years ago this week – Paul Volcker’s Federal Reserve abandoned gradualism. It set out to control the supply of money directly and let interest rates find their own level. They found it near 20 per cent. In March 1980 President Carter added credit controls of his own, which deepened a downturn and were dismantled within months. Inflation eventually broke. So did gold. The mechanism at work today is the same one, in a lower key. The war disrupted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and carried Brent crude from around $73 a barrel to $118 by late April. US consumer price inflation reached 4.2 per cent in May, with energy the principal cause. The Federal Reserve, now chaired by Kevin Warsh, responded in September by raising rates to a range of 3.75–4.00 per cent. The vote was unanimous, and 16 of its 18 policymakers expect at least one further rise before the year is out. The next decision falls on 27–28 October. Gold pays no interest. When cash and bonds pay more, and the dollar firms, the cost of holding it rises. The conflict, in other words, is weighing on gold by way of inflation: the market is trading the central bank’s response to the war rather than the war itself. Whose hand is on the lever? It is tempting to speak of a president reviving a Carter-era playbook. The phrase assumes that the playbook is his to open. For the most part, it is not. Fiscal policy belongs largely to Congress, and a federal deficit in the region of 6 per cent of GDP leaves little room for manoeuvre in any case. What remains to the White House is persuasion, appointment and pressure – real influences, but not controls. Monetary policy belongs to the Federal Reserve. President Trump has argued that rates should stand at 1 per cent or lower; the chairman he chose has raised them. The echo of 1979 is exact in one respect only: Carter appointed Volcker, and it was Volcker’s medicine, not Carter’s, that the economy swallowed. The one lever that is unmistakably the President’s is the war. At a rally in Nebraska on Monday he described higher prices as “a small price to pay” and said the conflict would be over very soon. If that proves right, the reopening of Hormuz would do more to lower inflation, and with it interest rates, than any instruction to the central bank. That is a matter of diplomacy, not macroeconomic management. What it means For commodity traders. Dollar funding is becoming dearer at the very moment that energy, freight and feedstock prices remain volatile. Working capital costs more, and a firm dollar bears down on buyers in import-dependent markets, not least across West and Southern Africa. In such conditions the tenor of financing, the depth of counterparty relationships and the discipline of hedging count for more than any directional view. Hormuz remains the barometer. For investors. Gold is not a hedge against bad news as such. It protects against falling real yields and a weakening currency; it offers little shelter from a central bank intent on restoring both. Those who bought at the peak in 1980 waited nearly three decades to see that price again. The difference today is that central banks themselves remain steady buyers, which lends the metal a support it lacked then. For savers. Higher rates are, at last, a headline in their favour. The figure that matters, however, is the real return. A deposit paying 4 per cent while prices rise by 4 per cent is merely standing still. The lesson of 1979 is not that history repeats. It is that the crisis was brought to an end by a central banker in Washington and by negotiators in Algiers. Neither was pulling a presidential lever. This article is commentary and does not constitute investment advice.
Clariant Brings Its Laboratories Closer to the Customer in China
6 October 2026 Chemistry travels well, but innovation is better done close to home. That is the thinking behind Clariant’s decision to open two new research and development laboratories for its Additives business in China, announced on 18 August. The first sits at Daya Bay in Huizhou, beside the company’s flame retardants plant. That plant was inaugurated in 2023 and gained a second production line last November, taking total investment in the site to CHF 100 million. The new laboratory will develop the next generation of flame retardants and is designed to welcome collaboration with Chinese universities and innovation partners. The second is in Shanghai, within the additives technology centre at the One Clariant Campus. Its field is performance additives – antioxidants, light stabilisers and waxes – and its facilities run from synthesis and analytics through to pilot-scale production. Taken together, the two represent a change of kind. Clariant already developed applications locally; it can now create new additives in China from first research to pilot scale. The materials in question serve some of the fastest-moving industries anywhere, among them e-mobility, electronics, artificial intelligence and packaging – sectors in which a few months gained in development can decide who leads. The laboratories also complete a picture that has been taking shape for some time. Last November Clariant announced a joint venture with Fuhua on phosphorus-based flame retardants, and opened a second line at its Cangzhou plant, run jointly with Beijing Tiangang, to serve China’s nylon industry. Research, manufacturing and partnership now sit side by side in the same market. The company calls the approach “In China, For China”, and for its customers the result is practical: shorter lead times, quicker technical support and products designed around their own requirements. Manuel Mueller, Head of Strategy and Innovation for the Adsorbents & Additives business unit, put the ambition plainly: to strengthen Clariant’s standing as the “partner of choice for innovative and sustainable additive solutions”. It is a phrase that will ring true to anyone who works with the company. Gapuma’s own partnership with Clariant lies in a different field – Well Service Additives, across Nigeria, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire – but the qualities on show in Huizhou and Shanghai are the ones we have come to know: patience, investment and a readiness to stand close to the customer. We congratulate our partner on a significant milestone.
The Lights Go Out in Hull: How Energy Costs Are Redrawing the Chemical Map
23 September 2026 There is a particular silence to a mothballed chemical plant. The flares die and the pipework cools, and a site built to run without pause for decades simply stops. This week, that silence descended on Saltend, on the north bank of the Humber, where Ineos began idling its three acetyls plants. Two have already ceased production and the third will follow within days. They will remain idle until further notice. What makes the moment significant is not only what these plants make but what they were. According to Ineos, they are the last world-scale acetyls units left in Europe. Every other producer on the continent has already closed, and each closure was blamed on the same thing: energy costs that could not be competed with. A problem of physics as much as price The chemistry explains the vulnerability. At Saltend, natural gas is both the energy that drives the process and the feedstock from which acetic acid, acetic anhydride and ethyl acetate are made. When gas prices rise, the whole operation becomes uneconomic, however modern the equipment or efficient the process. Prices have risen sharply. Wholesale gas in Britain and Europe has almost doubled since July, as disruption to oil and gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz has rippled through global energy markets. “I’m sure people will find it hard to believe that we are being forced to mothball some of the most efficient plants in Europe but with gas prices now 12 times the level in the US and 8 times that of China, we just cannot compete,” said Sir Jim Ratcliffe, founder and chairman of Ineos. That 12-to-one ratio is Ineos’s own calculation. Independent market data put the gap between British and American gas nearer eight to ten times, depending on the hub and contract measured. On any measure, it is a chasm that no operational excellence can bridge. Part of a pattern, not an isolated event Hull is not an outlier. Yara mothballed its ammonia plant on the same Saltend site in early 2025. Ineos closed Britain’s last synthetic ethanol plant at Grangemouth. The acetyls business itself cut a fifth of its workforce last year. Each decision on its own might be read as a single company’s commercial choice. Taken together, they describe a structural shift: gas-based chemical production is leaving Europe. Ineos has not closed the door entirely. It is reportedly exploring direct purchases of American liquefied natural gas, a process that could take up to a year, and could restart if prices ease. It is also calling on the UK and EU to impose tariffs on Chinese imports. For now, however, a region that consumes these chemicals in large volumes no longer makes them at scale. Where the molecules go next Acetyls are rarely headline news, but they are everywhere. Acetic acid feeds coatings, adhesives and food production. Acetic anhydride is essential to pharmaceuticals, aspirin among them. Ethyl acetate is a workhorse solvent in printing inks, laminating adhesives and flexible packaging. The European manufacturers who depended on Hull have not stopped needing these materials. They have simply started looking elsewhere, to the United States, China, the Middle East and Asia more widely. That search has consequences well beyond Europe. When one major region turns to the global market in a hurry, cargoes are redirected, prices firm and lead times lengthen, including in markets that never bought from Hull. If tariffs are imposed, Chinese product shut out of Europe will seek homes elsewhere, including across Africa and Latin America. There is also a regulatory dimension. Acetic anhydride is a controlled drug precursor, so replacing supply from new origins requires rigorous licensing and end-user checks. “What happened in Hull this week will be felt far beyond Humberside,” said Russell Brill, Director of Purchasing at Gapuma Group. “When a region loses its last major source of a basic chemical, buyers do not stop needing it; they go looking elsewhere, and they all go looking at once. Our job is to make sure our customers are not caught in that rush: to know every credible origin, to secure volumes early and to be straight with people about where prices are heading.” The barometer moves At Gapuma, we have long treated the Strait of Hormuz as a barometer for the direction of global trade and finance. Most of the time, its readings show up in freight rates and insurance premiums. This week, the reading appeared somewhere far less expected: in a quiet chemical park in East Yorkshire. The lesson is uncomfortable but clear. Where chemistry gets made is increasingly decided by the price of energy, and that price is increasingly decided by geopolitics. As regional production gives way to longer, multi-origin supply chains, the distributor’s role changes. It is no longer simply a middleman. It is a shock absorber, a navigator and, at times, the difference between a production line that runs and one that stops. Hull’s plants may yet restart. Until they do, the gap they leave will be filled by those who saw it coming.
Dire Straits: The Hormuz Stalemate at Six Months
7 September 2026 The Strait of Hormuz has burned again. On Saturday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it had struck three oil tankers and three US-linked vessels in the waterway, in retaliation for fresh American strikes on Iranian tankers earlier the same day, including the crude carrier M/T Kylo. It is the latest exchange in a confrontation that has now run for over six months, since the United States and Israel opened their campaign against Iran on 28 February, and it comes after barely a month of relative calm. We return to this story, as we have done repeatedly over the past six months, not simply because the flashpoint recurs, but because Hormuz has proved itself a genuine barometer for the direction of global trade and finance. Freight rates, insurance premiums, oil and gas prices, and by extension inflation expectations and interest rate decisions worldwide, all take their cue from what happens in this one stretch of water. Few single chokepoints tell you as much, as quickly, about where the global economy is heading. The toll is no longer abstract. The crisis has claimed twenty seafarers and one port worker, with thirty-five more injured; Iran alone struck at least thirteen commercial vessels in August, including a strike on the tanker MT Sidr that killed two crew. Traffic through the Strait, which normally carries around a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade and close to a fifth of its liquefied natural gas, remains a fraction of its pre-crisis volume, and increasingly hard to verify: with more vessels switching off their transponders to avoid becoming targets, even Washington’s own figures on daily barrel flows are treated with scepticism by independent maritime analysts. Markets have responded in the only language they know. Brent crude has posted a third straight daily gain, quoted around $79 a barrel by XTB, while broader crude benchmarks tracked by Trading Economics were up roughly nine per cent on the week and trading closer to $91. The World Bank now expects energy prices to surge 24 per cent this year, the sharpest rise since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and overall commodity prices to climb 16 per cent, driven by energy, fertiliser and record metal prices. None of that is contained to the Gulf: it is arriving at exactly the moment the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan are trying to judge whether inflation is beaten or merely resting, with Friday’s US inflation print now doing double duty as a bellwether for both monetary policy and the price of keeping ships moving through Hormuz. Has a resolution become more plausible, or less? The honest answer is: less, for now, though not for want of trying. Delegations from Washington and Tehran did sit down in June around a memorandum of understanding meant to end the war; the Islamabad Talks in the spring produced their own short-lived ceasefire; the two governments have between them stood up a Persian Gulf Strait Authority and an Islamabad Memorandum as embryonic institutional scaffolding; and as recently as 25 August, the US Navy confirmed it had cleared the Strait’s principal shipping lane of more than a hundred suspected mines. Each of these is a genuine, if partial, achievement. But each has also been followed, within weeks, by a fresh exchange of fire, and this weekend’s strikes on tankers and US-linked vessels suggest the underlying dispute, over who controls passage through Hormuz, remains as unresolved as it was in February. That is the real cost of stalemate: not only the lives already lost and the tankers already burned, but a global economy that cannot fully exhale. Insurers cannot fully price Gulf risk while ceasefires keep breaking. Central banks cannot fully relax while a fifth of the world’s LNG and a quarter of its seaborne oil sit hostage to one of the narrowest, most contested shipping lanes on Earth. And companies across the commodities and chemicals trade, ourselves included, cannot plan a “normal” that keeps receding by another month, then another. A durable settlement, whatever shape it eventually takes, is not simply a diplomatic nicety; it is the precondition for the world’s freight rates, feedstock costs and interest rate decisions to return to something like predictability. Until then, the bill for uncertainty keeps being paid, by shipowners, by insurers, by consumers, and by every business that trades across this most contested of waterways. This is the latest in our ongoing coverage of the Strait of Hormuz crisis and its implications for global trade.
Panama Canal Sets New Auction Record as Korean LPG Carrier Pays $5.3 Million
26 August 2026 For the second time in a month, a South Korean shipowner has broken the record for the highest transit fee ever paid at the Panama Canal. Bloomberg reports that SK Gas, the LPG trading arm of SK Group, has agreed to pay $5.3 million for a booking slot allowing its carrier G. Spirit to transit the canal’s locks on 1 September. Without the payment, the vessel would still make the crossing, but only after a wait of up to eleven days. The record is the latest marker in a trend we highlighted last week, when the Canal Authority’s decision to cut daily transits from 3 September – falling from 36 to 34, and to 32 from 15 September – set the stage for exactly this kind of premium. It follows hard on the heels of the $4.6 million paid earlier this month by SK Shipping to move a near-identical carrier, G. Arete, on the same long-standing rotation between the Houston Ship Channel and East Asian markets. Two forces are compounding here. The first is demand-side: the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz has curtailed Gulf energy shipments to Asia, pushing up LPG prices and squeezing South Korean traders, who are reportedly seeking to offset domestic losses through more profitable positioning elsewhere in the global market. The second is supply-side: an El Niño-driven drought has forced the Canal Authority to reduce both maximum vessel draught and, from this week, the number of daily transit slots available. The result is a market in which the auction premium for priority passage has become a genuine cost of doing business rather than an occasional anomaly. For trading and logistics operators, the lesson from two record-breaking bids inside a month is the same one this drought has been signalling since it began: canal capacity is no longer a given, and route planning now needs to price that risk in as a matter of course, not an exception.
Panama Canal Authority to Cut Daily Transits as El Niño Drought Bites
21 August 2026 From 3 September, the Panama Canal Authority will reduce daily vessel transits from 36 to 34, falling further to 32 from 15 September, as a severe El Niño-driven drought depletes the freshwater lakes that feed the canal’s locks. The move reverses a period of relative ease earlier this year and lands at a moment when traffic through the waterway has already been elevated, boosted by US Gulf energy exports rerouted through the canal following disruption to the Strait of Hormuz. The numbers underline why this matters well beyond Panama. The canal carries around five per cent of global maritime trade and some 40 per cent of US container traffic, with no viable substitute on the US East Coast to Asia corridor, only a costly detour of roughly 8,000 nautical miles around Cape Horn. Vessel operators are already paying a premium to avoid delay: one auction slot changed hands for close to 4 million US dollars in early August, a figure surpassed days later by a 4.6 million dollar bid. For trading and logistics businesses, this is now a familiar pattern rather than an isolated shock. The 2023 to 2024 drought cut canal traffic by roughly a third and rippled through global supply chains for months. This second major restriction inside three years suggests freshwater scarcity, not lock capacity, has become the canal’s binding constraint, a structural risk rather than a seasonal one. At Gapuma, where our business depends on the reliable movement of commodities and speciality chemicals across borders, developments like this reinforce the value of diversified sourcing, flexible logistics planning and close attention to the routes our supply chains depend upon.
EU Gas Storage Passes 60%: A Thinner Cushion Heading Into Winter
Gapuma Market Commentary 18 August 2026 European gas storage has crossed the 60% threshold, but the milestone tells only part of the story. According to the latest figures from Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE), reported by Platts, part of S&P Global Commodity Insights, EU stocks stood at 60.8% full as of 15 August, having passed 60% two days earlier. On a percentage basis, that is the lowest reading for this point in the calendar than in any of the previous five years – a gap that matters more to the winter outlook than the headline number itself. A market not pricing storage risk The shortfall reflects a combination of tighter supply and weak commercial incentive. Since the start of the year, the EU has brought in roughly 63.6 million tonnes of LNG (some 87.7 billion cubic metres of gas), around 4.1% below the same period in 2025, as the market continues to absorb the loss of Qatari export volumes and the broader disruption the war in the Middle East has caused to global gas flows. Compounding this, the Dutch TTF forward curve has remained persistently backwardated. Platts assessed the month-ahead TTF benchmark at €60.68/MWh on 14 August, a premium of €1.65/MWh over the Winter 2026 contract. In practical terms, this removes much of the financial reward that would normally encourage market participants to buy gas cheaply in summer and hold it for winter, leaving injections to run below their usual seasonal pace. Brussels eases the target, but scepticism persists Early in the Iran conflict, the European Commission encouraged member states to lower their national storage targets from 90% to 80%, using flexibilities within the EU’s gas storage regulation to soften the risk of price spikes tied to aggressive late-season buying. Even this reduced goal is now being questioned. Axpo’s head of energy market analysis and meteorology, Andy Sommer, said this month that reaching “well above 70% by November” would likely prove difficult on current trends. S&P Global Commodity Insights’ own CERA analysts, meanwhile, project European storage reaching around 75% full by the end of October – comfortably below the original 90% target, though still within reach of the relaxed one. Germany: the pivotal laggard Germany warrants particular attention as the final weeks of the injection season approach. As the EU’s largest single storage market, with capacity for around 246.5 TWh (roughly 23.3 billion cubic metres, some 22% of total EU storage), its fill rate continues to trail the wider bloc, sitting just below 50%. Berlin’s energy ministry has reiterated that it regards stocking as a task for market players rather than government, resisting pressure for direct intervention. There are, however, early signs of improved commercial appetite: storage operator SEFE fully allocated the 5 TWh of capacity offered at its Rehden facility in a recent auction, a marked change from previous rounds where volumes went unsold, aided by a new options-based product that defers most fees until capacity is actually used. Outlook None of this points, on present evidence, to a supply emergency. Europe’s LNG import and transmission infrastructure remains structurally sound, and the remaining weeks of the injection season could still narrow the gap to the relaxed target, particularly if commercial incentives to store improve. Equally, the current trajectory leaves a materially thinner buffer than markets have grown used to in recent winters, and the consequences of a cold snap, a further Middle East-related supply shock, or a slower-than-expected Qatari LNG return would fall on a system with less spare capacity to absorb them. For buyers and traders exposed to European gas and downstream chemicals pricing, the sensible course is to treat the current trajectory as a planning input rather than a settled outcome, and to build resilience into contracting and hedging strategies well ahead of the November deadline, rather than waiting to see how the season closes. Gapuma’s energy markets team will continue to monitor the injection season as it develops.
Gapuma × Clariant: A Fortnight in the Global Spotlight
12 August 2026 Two weeks ago, Clariant – one of the world’s most respected names in speciality chemicals – named Gapuma Group its non-exclusive distributor for West Africa, entrusting us with the HOSTADRILL®, HOSTAMER® and HOSTASTIM® Well Service Additives ranges across Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. For a distributor built on years of regional trust, being chosen by a partner of Clariant’s standing is exactly the kind of validation that cannot be bought. What followed exceeded even that. The announcement was carried by trade and business press across Africa, the Gulf, Asia and South America – close to a dozen titles in all – before landing, days later, in World Oil, one of the US energy sector’s most authoritative trade voices. George Nunes, head of Clariant Oil Services, called it a partnership that “advances our route-to-market strategy” in a region of growing demand. A fortnight on, that is the story we are proudest to share – not just the announcement, but everything it went on to earn. Read World Oil’s coverage in full below: Clariant expands well service additives distribution across West Africa
Has Oil Stopped Reacting to Politics – and Started Steering It?
4 August 2026 Brent and WTI rebounded on Tuesday, clawing back part of Monday’s sharp sell-off, with Brent trading back above $84 a barrel. Traders were left questioning whether the market had priced in a diplomatic breakthrough that, according to Tehran, does not exist. It is the latest lurch in a pattern that has defined the Strait of Hormuz crisis for months: political announcements moving crude by five, six, even seven per cent in a single session, only to reverse within a day. Monday’s decline followed President Trump’s claim that talks with Iran would resume. It unwound within twenty-four hours once Iran’s foreign ministry denied any such negotiations were under way, and a vessel was struck near Hormuz for good measure. The rhythm is now familiar enough that analysts increasingly suspect political messaging is being timed to the market itself, rather than the market simply reacting to political fact. As Kyle Rodda, senior market analyst at capital.com, put it: “Fridays are for fighting but Mondays are for the markets in Trump’s world.” It is a wry line, but it captures something real – the choreography of threat and climbdown looks increasingly calibrated to price, not the reverse. Tehran itself has accused Washington of using announcements to move financial markets rather than negotiate in good faith. Whatever the accusation’s merit, it reinforces the sense that political rhetoric is now tracking the oil price rather than setting it. Layer in OPEC+’s steady supply increases and forecasts from Goldman Sachs and Kotak Securities pointing to a cooling market into 2027, and a fragile picture emerges: crude’s fundamentals argue for lower prices, while its politics argue for volatility. For traders, distributors and buyers across the commodities and chemicals supply chain, the lesson is discipline. Headlines can move price faster than verified cargo data ever will, and a rally built on a denied negotiation is not a rally built to last. At Gapuma, we watch the shipping lanes and the barrels – not just the briefings.
From Dialogue to Delivery: Gapuma Applauds ASIS 2026’s Drive for Local Content across Africa
28 July 2026 The fifth edition of the Africa Social Impact Summit (ASIS 2026) has once again shown what is possible when purpose meets partnership. Co-convened by Sterling One Foundation, the United Nations in Nigeria, the Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, and the Lagos State Government, the summit brought together over 2,000 leaders, investors, policymakers and changemakers in Lagos under the theme “Financing for Development: Building Resilience and Transforming Emerging Economies.” At Gapuma Group, we welcome ASIS 2026’s renewed commitments from partners including UNFPA, Seplat Energy, IHS Towers and The Coca-Cola Company, and the summit’s clear message that Africa’s development will be built through collaboration and local ownership, not isolated effort. It is a message that sits close to home. Through GLB, our Nigerian business, and across our chemicals and commodities operations and distribution networks in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa, Gapuma has long championed local content as the foundation of sustainable growth. For us, that means local teams, local partnerships and local capacity built to last, whether we are supplying industry in Lagos or building presence elsewhere on the continent. ASIS 2026’s shift from dialogue to delivery reflects exactly the approach we take to our own markets: real investment, real presence and real accountability to the communities in which we operate. Africa’s growth will not be financed from the outside looking in. It will be built by businesses and institutions rooted in the continent, working together towards common goals. We congratulate Sterling One Foundation, the United Nations in Nigeria and all this year’s co-convenors and partners on a summit that has once again turned ambition into action. Gapuma remains committed to playing its part, one market, one partnership and one community at a time.
The Barrel: The last place the story shows up
9 July 2026 When the US–Iran ceasefire collapsed in the Strait of Hormuz this week, the headlines went straight to price. Brent ticked up, then wobbled either way, and most commentary moved on. But for the companies that actually move oil, gas and chemicals through that water, the price is not the problem. The problem is everything sitting underneath it. Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and LNG. That makes route reliability a commercial contract in its own right, and it is precisely the thing a trader cannot hedge. You can hedge crude. You cannot hedge a captain who refuses to enter a severe-risk zone, an insurer who rewrites a war-risk exclusion overnight, or a payment rail that quietly narrows while your cargo is still mid-voyage. That last point is the one keeping people up. A US general licence opened a legal corridor for Iranian oil on 21 June. Within roughly a fortnight it was revoked and replaced with a wind-down order. Legal permission, it turns out, is not the same as bankable confidence, and each transaction now carries a lifecycle risk that is far harder to price than the commodity itself. This is why so many commodities businesses are in a genuine tailspin right now. The instinct is to watch the screen. But the screen is a lagging indicator. A vessel that turns back, an insurer that hesitates, a bank that declines a settlement, none of it registers immediately as a shortage. It registers as friction. Friction compounds quietly, and by the time it reaches the price, the decision you needed to make was already late. The firms that come through this well will not be the ones with the best price call. They will be the ones who treated the route, the licence and the counterparty as three separate clocks, and started tracking all three before the market did. Strategy in this environment is not prediction. It is knowing which questions to ask, and asking them early. Gapuma Group | Trading commodities and speciality chemicals across international markets, with a clear read on the ground beneath the price.
The relief is real… The certainty is not
1st July 2026 For four months, the price of oil has told the story of a war few people expected and fewer still know how to end. Now, as June closes, that story appears to be turning: Brent has slipped to around $73 a barrel, its steepest monthly fall since the pandemic and its worst quarter in six years. Petrol stations, freight desks and finance directors across the trading world are, for the first time since February, allowed to exhale. But exhaling is not the same as trusting what comes next. The rally in supply behind this fall in price is genuine enough. Tankers are moving through the Strait of Hormuz again, sanction waivers have loosened Iranian barrels back into a starved market, and the diplomatic language out of Washington and Tehran has, briefly, softened. Yet scratch beneath the relief and the foundations look considerably less solid than the headline number suggests. The current arrangement holding the strait open is not a settlement; it is a temporary courtesy, with Iran having agreed to forgo transit fees for just sixty days and reserving the right to reinstate them the moment that window closes. A ceasefire with an expiry date is not peace. It is an interval. It is worth asking, too, who is actually behind the falling price, because the answer is not simply optimism. Much of this year’s most consistent buying came from trend-following hedge funds, the quiet, algorithm-driven money that piled into long oil positions as the conflict escalated in spring. That money is now heading for the exit, not because the war is over, but because the trade has stopped trending. What looks like the market voting for peace is, in no small part, funds voting to bank their profits before the next headline turns against them. This is a market that has grown fluent in front-running its own volatility. Even regulators have taken notice: several unusually well-timed bets against oil, placed in the minutes before key American statements on Iran this year, are now the subject of scrutiny. Ask a commodities desk how confident it feels and the honesty is telling. Callum Macpherson, head of commodities at Investec, described the situation bluntly as ultimately unsustainable, adding that markets are simply finding ways to muddle through, because the ordinary business of buying cargoes and hedging exposure cannot pause for a war to make up its mind. That, in a sentence, is the position every trading, logistics and distribution business now finds itself in. So can this easing be relied upon as the basis for forward strategy? Not yet, and arguably not for some time. A lower oil price today buys breathing room, not certainty. Freight contracts, insurance premiums and supplier terms still need to be built for a strait that could tighten again with a single statement out of Washington or Tehran. The prudent response is not to chase the rally down, but to hedge as though the ceasefire is what it has repeatedly proven itself to be this year: fragile, reversible and provisional. The deal may hold. History this year suggests we should not assume it will.