Live WTI & Brent Oil Prices, Futures Chart & Forward Curve

The futures quotes refresh every five minutes while the page is open, pulled contract by contract from Yahoo Finance. The number already present when the page first loads is the most recent daily settlement from our hourly snapshot, so a real figure is in the HTML for anything reading the page directly, and the live intraday quote then overlays it. If a symbol fails to fetch, that card shows N/A rather than a stale or estimated value — a missing price is reported as missing, never filled in.

No. They are exchange quotes relayed by Yahoo Finance, which for NYMEX and ICE energy futures are delayed rather than live tick data, and the endpoint does not publish the exact delay per contract. That is perfectly adequate for following the market through the day, but it is not a trading feed and should not be used as one. The daily closes behind the two-year chart are settled prices and are final.

Brent is a waterborne crude priced in the North Sea; WTI is priced inland at Cushing, Oklahoma. The gap between them largely reflects the cost and ease of moving a barrel from the US midcontinent to the coast and onto a ship. A wide spread makes US crude exports more attractive and usually follows either a build-up of inland US supply or a disruption affecting Atlantic Basin cargoes; a narrow spread points the other way. The card above is simply Brent minus WTI, computed from the same two legs shown in the price bar.

It is the gross refining margin on a three-barrel basket: two barrels of gasoline and one of heating oil for every three barrels of crude. The formula used is [(2 x RBOB + 1 x heating oil) x 42 - 3 x WTI] / 3, with the two product contracts multiplied by 42 to convert dollars per gallon into dollars per barrel. It is a market-implied margin, not any particular refinery's profit: it ignores operating costs, the actual product yield of a given plant and the crude grade being run.

Because the next calendar month has often already stopped trading. A WTI delivery month ceases trading about three business days before the 25th of the preceding month, so for roughly the last ten days of any month the following month is already off the board. ICE Brent expires earlier still — the last business day of the month two months before delivery — which puts its front contract a further month out than WTI's. The curves above generate contract symbols from today's date, deliberately request a couple of extra months and drop whichever no longer exist, which is what keeps the strip correct across a contract roll.

Contango is an upward-sloping curve, where contracts further out cost more than the prompt month; it generally signals comfortable or surplus supply, and it rewards storing oil. Backwardation slopes downward, with the nearest barrel the most expensive, and generally signals tight prompt supply. The label under each curve is derived from the slope of the contracts actually fetched, so it describes the curve on screen rather than a forecast.

No, and it is labelled that way deliberately. It shows the average month-over-month change for each calendar month across the full monthly futures history, computed in your browser. A month that averages positive across twenty-five years still falls in plenty of individual years, and the average says nothing about the current supply and demand balance, inventory levels or OPEC+ policy. Treat it as a description of what has happened, not a signal about what will.