The PetroStack Report

Petroleum Market Conditions Brief

True North Data Strategies LLC · Week Ending August 3, 2026 | Sample Edition

Prepared 2026-08-05 · Document TNDS-MKT-SAMPLE v1.0

Bottom Line

Crude is holding high while refined products fell hard last week. That gap matters more to your rack markup this month than anything else in this brief.

• Crude held its ground. WTI closed at $81.96 per barrel. Brent closed at $88.90. Converted to gallons, WTI crude costs roughly $1.95 per gallon before refining.
• Products dropped. New York Harbor gasoline fell 7.90 percent in one week. New York Harbor heating oil fell 5.75 percent. Diesel did not fall as far and is holding near $3.90.
• Volatility is real and current. The market is moving fast in both directions. Heating oil traded a range of $3.6743 to $3.8582 in a single session on August 5. That is an 18 cent swing inside one business day, on volume 109 percent of the 65 day average.

What this means for the pricing desk: Rack prices follow the spot market with a lag. Product prices fell last week while crude did not, so the rack you buy at this week is likely to reflect that drop before your posted street price does. Two consequences: any fuel already in your tanks was bought at the higher number, and any keep-full or contract account priced off a stale index is quietly moving against you. Check the date on your own price feed before the next markup run.

Where Prices Are Right Now

Spot prices as of August 3, 2026. Gallon prices are wholesale spot, not rack and not street.

Crude benchmarks

Distillates and diesel

Gasoline and propane

What Moved This Week

Live confirmation, August 5, 2026 at 2:47 p.m. EDT: NYMEX front month heating oil was quoted at $3.79, up 0.52 percent on the session, against an August 4 settlement of $3.7705. Day range $3.6743 to $3.8582. Volume 29,330 contracts against a 65 day average of 27,010. The 52 week range on this contract is $2.0469 to $4.8360.

Read that 52 week range twice. The market has moved more than $2.75 per gallon in the last twelve months on this one product. Any pricing process that assumes next month looks like this month will be wrong, and the error will be larger than your margin.

Seasonal Position

Against the last five comparable seasons, the current season is running modestly above trend. This is the one signal in the dataset with real history behind it.

Ten season history:

2023 was the recent peak at $3.191. The current season sits 21 percent below that peak and 15 percent above last season. Prices are elevated but not at crisis levels.

What This Brief Does Not Tell You

Straight talk on the limits of the underlying model. Read this section before anyone makes a buying or pricing decision from it.

1. The 30 day forecasts are not reliable enough to act on

The forecasting model was tested against four products. Directional accuracy measures how often it correctly calls up versus down. A coin flip scores 50 percent.

The average across all four is 50.28 percent. The model cannot currently predict price direction better than a coin. Its own error band is also wider than the range it forecasts. On heating oil the model projects less than a tenth of a cent of movement over thirty days, while its measured error is over fifteen cents and the market moved eighteen cents in one session this week.

Why the score is this low: the engine projects nearly flat prices in a market the pipeline's own volatility detector calls fast moving, and its measured error band is wider than everything it predicts, so even its correct calls are luck sized. That is an engine problem, not a data problem, and it is why the forecasts live in this section instead of the body of the brief.

2. The pricing strategy recommendations are running on stale inputs

Do not use the cost basis recommendations yet: The cost_plus and index_plus recommendations and the associated spread deviation alerts are calculated from a cost basis frozen at April 30, 2025. The reason is simple: the rack price feed (OPIS) has not been connected to the pipeline since spring 2025, so the cost side of the tool stopped learning fifteen months ago. Those recommendations describe spring 2025 conditions, not today. They are excluded from this brief on purpose and should stay out of any markup decision until the OPIS feed is reconnected, which is the single highest value fix in this tool.

3. Weather is not a usable input in this dataset

The weather correlation was run across 499 observations and returned a coefficient of -0.025 with a regression slope of -0.0004. That is statistically indistinguishable from no relationship. The measured cold snap price impact of 0.13 percent is noise. This does not mean weather is irrelevant to heating oil demand in the real world. It means this particular dataset cannot see it, and no scheduling or inventory decision should lean on it.

4. The model disagrees with itself

The regime detector classifies the current market as volatile, 19 days in, with 20 day volatility of 4.43 percent and 20 day momentum of +17.53 percent. The forecast engine simultaneously projects flat prices for thirty days. Both cannot be right. The observed market data supports the volatile reading, which is another reason to discount the flat forecasts.

Appendix B: Sources and Method

Works cited

• U.S. Energy Information Administration, Petroleum and Other Liquids: Spot Prices
• U.S. Energy Information Administration, Today in Energy: Daily Prices
• MarketWatch, NYMEX Heating Oil Front Month (HO00)

Revision history

This is a sample edition of the Petroleum Market Conditions Brief, prepared by True North Data Strategies LLC from the PetroStack analysis run of August 5, 2026, and distributed to Operators Brief readers so they can see what an honestly labeled machine-assisted brief looks like. All prices are public benchmark data. This document is operational analysis for pricing and planning use. It is not investment, hedging, or trading advice.

Jacob Johnston | 719-204-6365 | jacob@truenorthstrategyops.com True North Data Strategies LLC | Colorado Springs, CO | SDVOSB / VOSB

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