Brent Crude 52-Week High and Low

How to Read a 52-Week Range

A single price tells you very little on its own. Eighty dollars a barrel is a high number in a year that traded between sixty and eighty-five, and a low number in a year that reached a hundred and twenty. The 52-week band is the cheapest possible context: it converts an isolated quote into a percentile inside the market's own recent history.

The position percentile shown above is calculated as the current price minus the 52-week low, divided by the full range, expressed as a percentage. A reading near zero means crude is scraping its yearly floor. A reading near one hundred means it is pressing the yearly ceiling. Readings in the forty to sixty band mean the market is mid-range and neither extreme is exerting much gravitational pull.

The width of the range matters as much as the position. A narrow band, say fifteen dollars from low to high, describes a year in which supply and demand stayed roughly matched. A band of forty dollars or more describes a year with a genuine shock, such as a supply disruption, an OPEC+ policy reversal or a demand collapse.

Why Brent and WTI Ranges Differ

The two benchmarks rarely set their yearly highs and lows on the same day, and their ranges are usually different widths. Brent is seaborne crude, so it reacts fastest to anything affecting international shipping, Middle East supply and European demand. WTI is landlocked at Cushing, Oklahoma, so it is more sensitive to US inventory data, pipeline capacity and domestic shale economics.

When the two ranges diverge sharply, the Brent-WTI spread is doing the work. A widening spread usually means waterborne barrels are commanding a premium, often because of a disruption outside North America. A narrowing spread often points to US export capacity absorbing the difference. Both series are shown above so the divergence is visible directly.