Commodities That Gained in 2026: Measuring From the December Base, and Its Blind Spots

The list below answers the question literally: these are the commodity instruments in the site's database, sorted by price change within calendar year 2026, from the close of the last trading day of December 2025 to the latest available quote, in descending order. There is nothing else in this ranking: no judgement of whether something is expensive or cheap, and no view on whether the move will continue.

What exactly is measured

There is a single criterion: the relative change in price between two points. The starting point is fixed by the calendar, not by trading. It does not shift from day to day until the year is over. The end point floats: it is the latest quote. That is why the make-up of the top of the list changes every day, while the base does not.

This has a less than obvious consequence: the further the year moves away from January, the more the result depends on what happened at its very start. A commodity that repriced sharply in the first weeks of the year and has gone nowhere since will stay high in this ranking right up to December. Conversely, an instrument that only picked up speed in the autumn may rank below one whose momentum ran out long ago. A calendar-year measure shows the cumulative result, not current momentum.

Why a fixed base answers a different question from "over the past year"

A rolling twelve-month window counts back from today, and each day it drops the oldest day and adds a new one. A calendar-year measure stays anchored to a single date. These are different measurements, and they regularly produce different lists of leaders, especially when there was a price gap at the turn of December and January. If it is the rolling window you are after, it is covered separately: commodities that gained over the past year are measured from a floating base, and the gap between these two pictures is informative in its own right: it hints at which part of the year the main move took place in.

What the gain is measured in

A price change is always expressed in some currency, and for commodity markets that matters a great deal. The same barrel or tonne can show a different result in rouble terms and in foreign-currency terms if the exchange rate has moved over the year: part of a rise in rouble prices can be a revaluation of the currency rather than of the commodity. Before drawing conclusions from the order of the rows, check the caption of the table and the instrument page to see which currency and which contract the quote is based on. If your own task uses a different settlement currency, read the list as a relative order rather than as a ready-made figure.

Futures need a separate adjustment. A continuous series for a commodity is stitched together from contracts with different expiry dates, and the stitching creates an effect that the physical commodity does not have: the holder of a position pays or receives something when rolling from the expiring contract into the next one. The price in the table and the return from holding are not the same thing.

What this list does not tell you

First, it is not a forecast. Sorting by past change is a description, not an extrapolation; ranking yesterday's leaders says nothing about the order in the future.

Second, it is not a ranking by quality or resilience. The same ranking can place a commodity with a deep, liquid market next to an instrument that trades rarely, where the quote updates unevenly and a large relative change comes from a thin order book.

Third, the causes are not visible here. A rise in a commodity's price can result from demand, a supply disruption, weather, logistics, bans or a currency move, and the "price change" criterion compresses all of these stories into a single number. Separating them has to be done by hand, from news and disclosures, not from the ranking; the starting points are the news feed and issuer disclosures.

Fourth, and this is the most common mistake, a commodity that has risen in price is not the same as a rise in the share price of its producer. Between the two stand costs, debt, export restrictions, the currency mix of revenue and the tax burden. How exactly a move in commodities feeds through to the price of a stock is covered in the article on intermarket analysis; it is worth checking this on a specific stock in the equities section, not by intuition.

How to read the table

Step 1: look at the spread of values, not just the top row. If the difference between neighbouring positions is tiny, the order between them is random and will change by tomorrow.

Step 2: open the page of the instrument you are interested in and check what exactly is being quoted: the physical commodity, a specific contract or a continuous series.

Step 3: compare the calendar-year measure with the rolling twelve-month window. If they agree, the performance has been steady; if they diverge, the move is concentrated at the beginning or the end of the year.

Step 4: if you need a conclusion for a portfolio, move from the commodity to the instrument through which that commodity is accessible, from producers' shares to exchange-traded funds. Unfamiliar abbreviations in the captions are explained in the glossary.

A frank caveat about the data

This ranking is limited to the commodity coverage available in the site's database. A commodity that is not in the database will not appear in the list, however much it has risen; the absence of a row does not mean the absence of a move in the market. The source, update frequency and exchange of the quote should be checked on the page of the specific instrument: without that, two rows that look alike may rest on different contracts and different closing time zones.