Commodities

How to read our commodity analyses

A commodity's price depends above all on the physical balance of supply and demand: output from mines and wells, inventories and industrial consumption. Because almost all of them are priced in dollars, a stronger dollar tends to make them more expensive for the rest of the world and weigh on prices. Oil and gas are also driven by geopolitics — shipping routes, sanctions, OPEC+ decisions — while gold and silver also react to real interest rates and safe-haven demand.

In this section we keep the causal chain of each move — what happened, where and according to whom — and distinguish sustained rallies from one-off spikes: a price can touch an intermediate high and fall back, and that is not the same as a trend. When two figures from the same source do not match, we flag it instead of forcing a calculation.

Benchmark prices (Brent, WTI, spot gold, Chinese lithium carbonate) are not always comparable with each other. The full criteria are on the methodology page and technical terms in the glossary.