Two prices for the same barrel
Anyone comparing Monday's oil headlines with our price card will notice something odd. Reuters had WTI at $98.33 early in the session. Our WTI quote showed about $94. Both numbers are right. They are just for different barrels.
WTI is not a single price. It is a strip of futures contracts, one for each delivery month, and each one trades at its own level. The October 2026 contract stops trading on Tuesday, September 22. Most of the volume has already moved to November, and our price feed followed it late on Thursday. Many news wires keep quoting October until the day it expires.
That is where the $4 gap comes from.
What the curve looks like right now
Here is the WTI strip as of Monday morning:
| Contract | Price |
|---|---|
| October 2026 (expires Tuesday) | $98.10 |
| November 2026 | $93.97 |
| December 2026 | $90.33 |
| January 2027 | $87.38 |
Each month is cheaper than the one before it. Traders call this backwardation. Buyers are paying extra to get oil now rather than later, which is the classic sign of a tight physical market. In a calm year the gap between two neighboring months is often a matter of cents. A $4 gap between October and November is extreme.
The reason sits in Cushing, Oklahoma, where WTI futures are physically delivered. EIA data put crude stocks at the hub at 21.5 million barrels in the week to September 11, down for the week. That is not far above the roughly 20 million barrels traders treat as tank bottoms, the point where storage cannot drain much further. With Middle East oil flows still running about 6 million barrels a day below last year's average, according to JPMorgan, and Saudi Arabia's East-West bypass pipeline damaged by drone strikes, October WTI ran as high as $106 last Tuesday. Refiners who need barrels next month are paying up for them.
Why our chart shows a step down on Thursday
Our WTI feed switched from October to November late on Thursday, September 17. October's settlement that day was $101.91. November was trading near $96.60. On the chart, that shows up as a drop of about $5 in a single hour. No such trade happened. The line simply moved from one contract to the next.
The timing is not unusual. By Monday the November contract had traded more than 50,000 lots against about 3,000 for October, according to Investing.com data. Liquidity had already left the expiring month.
The daily change figure is affected too. Early Monday our card showed WTI down more than $7, or over 8%, measured against that last October settlement. Roughly half of that was a real decline. October itself fell about $3.60 between Thursday's settle and Monday morning as hopes for diplomacy drained some risk premium. Tim Waterer, chief market analyst at KCM Trade, told Reuters that some of that premium was coming out of oil on hopes that talks could ease the conflict this week. That followed a signal from President Trump that he was willing to meet Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian while both are in New York for the UN General Assembly. The other $4 or so is the spread between the two contracts, not a price move.
The same mismatch distorts the Brent-WTI spread. Brent's front month is already November, so wire services comparing November Brent with October WTI show a gap near $4. Our site compares November with November, which puts the spread near $7.60. Same delivery month is the cleaner comparison, but it will look very different from the headline number this week.
The rules behind the roll
CME Group, which runs the NYMEX exchange where WTI trades, sets the expiry. Trading in each contract ends three business days before the 25th of the month ahead of delivery. For October delivery that lands on Tuesday, September 22. Anyone still long after that is on the hook to take 1,000 barrels per contract at Cushing, which is why funds and most traders roll out days ahead of time. A Singapore-based broker told Reuters that some investors had probably moved their October positions into November a day before expiry.
Data vendors handle the switch differently. Some roll on volume, some on a fixed number of days before expiry, and some wait for the last trading day. Investing.com's continuous chart moved to November on September 20. Ours moved on the 17th. Reuters was still quoting October on Monday, one day before it expires. For a few days each month, every site is telling the truth and none of them agree.
What it means for the numbers you read here
- Our WTI price is now the November 2026 contract. It stays there until mid-October, when the same roll happens into December. November's last trading day is October 20.
- The step down on Thursday evening is a contract change, not a sell-off. Judge the trend from Friday on.
- When a headline quotes WTI "near $98" this week, it means the expiring October contract. Subtract the November discount and it lines up with our number.
- Brent is unaffected for now. Its November contract runs until September 30, and our Brent quote already tracks it.
The steep curve also carries a message of its own. Traders are paying $4 more for October oil than November, and another $3.60 more for November than December. That is the market betting the current squeeze eases as Saudi exports recover and the talks in New York go somewhere. If Hormuz stays tight into October, expect the front spread to stay wide, and expect the same confusion again when November expires.