Commodities trading has always been the finance industry’s most unsentimental business. Its practitioners make money by moving physical goods, and paper bets on them, from places that have too much to places that have too little. In 2026 the oil market suffered the largest supply disruption on record, and the traders did exactly what they are built to do.
The shock began with the war between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that followed. Reuters described it in June as “the world’s largest oil supply disruption ever.” Oil prices touched $126 a barrel on April 30, up from around $70 before the war, according to the Reuters report, before retreating to around $95 by early June.
The policy questions raised by the war, from its strategic rationale to its cost at the pump, have divided Washington along familiar lines and some unfamiliar ones, and they are beyond the scope of a markets column. What is not in dispute is what the dislocation did to the balance sheets of the people paid to manage it.
The trading houses
Trafigura, the world’s second-largest independent commodities trader by volume, reported net profit of $4.1 billion for the six months from October 2025 through March 2026. That first-half figure exceeded its entire 2025 profit of $2.7 billion. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization were $7.9 billion, up from $3.9 billion a year earlier, and the firm traded 8.7 million barrels a day of oil, refined fuels, natural gas and LNG, against 6.6 million for all of 2025.
Trafigura’s chief executive, Richard Holtum, was at pains to explain that the results were not simply a windfall from high prices. “Our results are driven by the complexity and cost of delivering those solutions, rather than by elevated commodity prices,” he said, as quoted by Reuters. The chief financial officer, Stephan Jansma, put it more simply: “In a volatile market our customers need us more than ever.”
The rest of the industry has been similarly fortunate. Vitol, the largest independent oil trader, made roughly $2 billion of profit in its first quarter, Bloomberg News reported, according to the same Reuters account; Vitol does not formally disclose full results. Gunvor said it made the equivalent of its entire 2025 gross profit, $1.63 billion, in the first quarter alone. Bloomberg News reported in September that Mercuria and Gunvor had more than doubled their profits.
None of these firms is based in New York; they are Swiss, Singaporean and Dutch in domicile and Geneva in temperament. But the markets they trade, and much of the financing behind them, run through Manhattan and Chicago.
The exchange
The clearest evidence is at CME Group, whose New York Mercantile Exchange is the home of West Texas Intermediate crude and Henry Hub natural gas futures. On October 2, CME reported record average daily volume of 31.8 million contracts in September, up 22 percent from a year earlier, and a record 29.4 million for the third quarter, up 16 percent.
Energy led. September energy volume rose 37 percent to 3.1 million contracts a day. Henry Hub natural gas futures were up 20 percent, at 602,000 a day. Most striking was the Micro WTI contract, a small-sized crude future popular with individual traders, whose daily volume rose 376 percent to 240,000 contracts. In metals, third-quarter volume in Micro Gold futures rose 43 percent and Micro Silver 129 percent.
The micro contracts are worth dwelling on. They were designed to let retail traders participate in markets once reserved for professionals, and their explosive growth suggests that the war trade has drawn in a new class of speculator. That is good business for the exchange. Whether it is good business for the speculators is a question the next price reversal will answer.
The banks and the funds
On Wall Street proper, commodities desks have had a strong year. Goldman Sachs, which has run one of the industry’s premier commodities businesses since its acquisition of J. Aron in 1981, said in its third-quarter results that fixed income, currency and commodities net revenues were $3.47 billion, roughly flat from a year earlier, with management citing strength in commodities and currencies on the earnings call.
The asset managers have been collecting their share, too. BlackRock reported that its commodity exchange-traded products held $156.9 billion at the end of September, after $6.9 billion of net inflows in the quarter. That is a large sum for a category that, for most of the last decade, was a niche allocation.
And the multi-strategy hedge funds, several of which built or bought commodities teams in the years after the 2022 energy shock, have positioned themselves to profit from exactly this kind of dislocation. Citadel’s commodities business has been among the most profitable trading operations in the industry in recent years, according to multiple published accounts, and rivals have spent heavily to recruit energy traders from banks and trading houses.
What it costs
The pleasure of the traders is not universally shared, and it should not be presented as though it were. The same dislocation that filled Trafigura’s coffers raised fuel costs for households and businesses around the world, and the political debate about how to respond, including releases from strategic reserves, pressure on producers to raise output, and the diplomatic and military course of the war itself, is being conducted in earnest by both parties in Congress and by governments abroad. Traders, for their part, argue that they are the shock absorbers of the system: by moving cargoes to where they are most needed, they reduce the shortages they profit from. That argument has merit and limits in roughly equal measure.
For now, the industry’s fortunes depend on how long the dislocation lasts. Trafigura said in June that performance had “continued to be good” into its second half, while warning that the external environment was hard to forecast. In commodities, that sentence is both the risk disclosure and the business plan.
Featured image: The New York Mercantile Exchange building in Lower Manhattan. Photo by Pascal Auricht via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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