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Brent crude oil spot prices are rising amid serious physical supply tensions in the global market. The quoted Brent spot price reflects cargoes delivered within a lead time of 10 days to 1 month. With peace talks between the United States and Iran stalled and a two-week ceasefire remaining fragile, the United States has blocked the Hormuz Strait, tightening available supplies and lifting Brent spot prices.
An unprecedented gap has emerged between Brent spot and Brent futures for the next month, suggesting expectations that supply will remain tight in the near term. On April 9, front-month Brent futures traded near $132 per barrel, up more than 7% from the previous session but below the record high of $144.42 set on April 7, just before the two-week ceasefire was announced.
On the same day, Brent futures traded below $97 per barrel, about $35 below the spot price. Brent spot is determined by buy/sell orders and cash trading on the physical crude market, meaning it reflects the actual value of crude. By the morning of April 13, Brent and WTI again surpassed $100 per barrel, indicating the Brent spot price could move higher.
Andrejka Bernatova, founder and CEO of Dynamix Corporation III, said a Brent spot price of $144 per barrel is not only a record, but also indicates physically available barrels are becoming scarce. She added that the market is pricing scarcity rather than only risk, and that until crude flows through the Hormuz Strait are restored, the $144 spot price should be viewed as a signal of tightness rather than a one-off anomaly.
Janiv Shah, vice president for oil markets at Rystad Energy, noted that even if futures prices fell below $100 in the past week, Brent spot remained well above that level. This, he said, shows buyers are still willing to pay high prices to secure increasingly scarce supply.
Morgan Stanley strategists warned that the Hormuz disruption has created a larger shock to the physical oil market than to the futures market. In a Morgan Stanley report, Brent spot was described as the market’s assessment of the value of a barrel delivered now, while Brent futures on ICE are a standard cash-settlement contract linked to later deliveries through a defined process. The report said the two prices are connected but do not measure the same moment or point in the supply chain.
Raymond James’ senior analyst Pavel Molchanov said recent supply disruptions have broken traditional patterns of price co-movement among crude oils, reflecting unprecedented tension and uncertainty. He cited several examples:
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