Brent crude settled Friday at $103.94 a barrel, down roughly six percent on the week as diplomatic optimism priced into the front-month contract faster than any underlying Hormuz throughput data could confirm. West Texas Intermediate closed the same Friday tape at $96.60. [1] The Sunday market is shut for Memorial Day weekend, and Friday's two closes are the operative numbers that will carry through the holiday Monday and into Tuesday's open in London.

The settlement print landed before President Trump's Saturday-evening Truth Social claim that an agreement with Iran had been "largely negotiated," but the week's slide is the leading indicator the post is now being read against. Brent had traded as high as $111 on Monday on the back of the May 22 AP wire reporting Gulf-allied strikes on Iranian targets; the back half of the week unwound the war premium as Rubio's "Plan B" language at Helsingborg and the Axios MOU leak moved the front of the curve. [2] A six percent weekly decline against a $110-handle starting point is the futures market saying it believes negotiated peace is more likely than it believed five trading days ago. It is not the same as the market saying negotiated peace has arrived.

WTI at $96.60 is the same call expressed against the Cushing storage basis. The U.S. domestic gasoline complex sits on top of it; AAA's national pump average held at $4.529 into Sunday morning, unchanged from Saturday's break from $4.552. [3] The pump price is the household receipt for the futures decline; the seven-day window into Tuesday's London open is the gap inside which the Truth Social either becomes a document or becomes the third unilateral claim of authorship the underlying transit data does not confirm.

-- DARA OSEI, London