Commodities that rose most over the year: what the annual change measures and what it hides

The list below answers the question literally: it takes commodity prices, compares today's quote with the quote from a year ago, calculates the percentage change and sorts the results in descending order. The top rows are the commodities with the strongest price gains over the rolling year, recalculated every time the page is served. No name in this text is fixed: the line-up changes while the text does not, so read the table, not the prose around it.

What exactly is being compared

Only one thing is measured: the ratio of the current price to the price of the same instrument a year ago. It is not the average price over the year, not output growth, not industry revenue and not the return on an investment in the commodity. Two numbers and the fraction between them make up the entire construction.

This gives the list its first property: it depends entirely on the base. If a commodity was in a trough a year ago after demand collapsed, even a return to a normal level shows up in the ranking as a powerful rally. Conversely, a commodity that stayed expensive all year but started from an already high level will not make the top rows at all, even though the year was excellent for producers. A high place in this ranking means "the price has changed a lot", not "the price is high".

Why the window is one year

The annual window was not chosen because it is a round number. Commodities are seasonal: gas gets more expensive ahead of the heating season, grain revolves around the harvest, and refined products around the driving season and refinery maintenance. Comparing with the same calendar point a year earlier lines up comparable phases of the cycle and strips out the seasonal component almost automatically. A shorter window picks that component up and passes it off as a trend.

The flip side is that a year is long enough for a single one-off shock — an accident, a sanctions decision, an export ban, a weather event — to define the whole row. The ranking cannot tell a persistent shortage from an isolated episode that simply has not yet dropped out of the window.

What this list does not tell you

It is not a return. In most cases the commodity price is taken from the front-month futures contract, and the continuous series is stitched together from successive contracts. Anyone holding a position paid for every roll: in contango the deferred contract is more expensive than the nearby one, and rolling eats up part of the price change. The gap between "the price went up" and "the holder made money" can be large for commodities, and its sign can go either way.

It does not carry over one-to-one to the producer's shares. Between the global benchmark price and a company's profit sit several filters: hedging, long-term contracts with a fixed pricing formula, export duty and mineral extraction tax, the discount to the benchmark grade, logistics costs and the settlement currency exchange rate. How a commodity impulse reaches a share price is covered separately: the channels through which interest rates and commodities reach share prices. This pass-through should be checked not against the ranking but against the financial statements: look at issuer disclosures and compare revenue with the price dynamics of the period.

Do not forget the quote currency. Commodities are priced mainly in dollars, and for a rouble-based holder the outcome combines the change in price and the change in the exchange rate. The site shows the currency of each instrument on its card — check it before setting the ranking against your own rouble returns. Which conversion, if any, is applied in the table itself does not follow from this article: check the instrument card.

Do not confuse a grade with a commodity. "Oil", "gas" and "coal" are families within which different benchmarks and hubs lead lives of their own: European and American gas prices have diverged several-fold while both remained "gas". A row in the ranking refers to a specific contract, not to the commodity group as a whole.

How to use it

The ranking is a generator of questions, not a conclusion. A sensible sequence of work looks like this.

First, determine what changed in the row — the numerator or the denominator: look at where the price stood a year ago and separate recovery from growth. Then find the cause in the news flow of that period: the market news feed shows whether it was a supply shock, a shift in demand or a regulatory decision. After that, look for who profits from it in the list of stocks, and test the hypothesis against the financial statements, not intuition. If the cause of the price rise was a one-off and has already been priced in, arriving late costs more than missing it altogether.

And finally. A commodity that has risen over the year is under no obligation to keep rising — commodity markets work in such a way that a high price itself triggers more supply and demand destruction. This list describes the past year and says nothing about the next one.

Unfamiliar concepts from this text — contango, benchmark grade, contract roll — are explained in the glossary.