One desk, one morning, in the order the prints landed. Times are East African.
06:05
Kinshasa put eight aircraft in the air over its own geology. The Programme de cartographie géophysique aéroportée et géologique, launched Monday under Félix Tshisekedi, runs 36 months with eight aircraft collecting magnetic, radiometric, gravimetric and electromagnetic data over Kongo Central, Kwango, Kwilu, Grand Kasaï and Grand Katanga. It is funded by the mining fund for future generations and executed by the Spanish firm Xcalibur Multiphysics Group SL, with the national geological service coordinating and a training component for Congolese geologists attached. Mines minister Louis Watum Kabamba framed it as buying down exploration cost and time. Cobalt settled at 39,245 USD/t, up 0.3% on the day, so the survey arrives into a market that is paying for discovery rather than begging for it.
07:20
The second high-level coordination meeting on the Lobito Corridor opened in Lusaka with the DRC, Angola, Zambia, the World Bank and the African Development Bank at the table. President Hakainde Hichilema used the opening to point at the Zambia-DRC one-stop border posts agreement as the near-term cost item, with customs harmonisation and private financing of power and logistics infrastructure as the agenda. The Congolese delegation, led by planning minister Guylain Nyembo with trade minister Julien Paluku and infrastructure minister John Banza, argued the corridor should carry industrial zones, agro-industry and tourism rather than only mineral trains. Copper on COMEX closed at 6.653 USD/lb, 14,667 USD/t, up 2.6% in a session, which is the number that keeps the three governments in the room.
09:40
The refined barrel fell out of bed. RBOB gasoline lost 10.1% in one session to 3.0577 USD/gal, 1,092 USD/t; ULSD dropped 4.2% to 4.4483 USD/gal, 1,392 USD/t; Brent gave back 2.9% to 99.30 USD/bbl. Crude held the three figures by a dime. The product complex did not, and cargo buyers who had been slow-walking Q4 nominations now have a very different screen to argue from.
11:15
Black Sea paper and Black Sea reality parted company again. Kernel reported higher earnings for fiscal 2026 while flagging that attacks are complicating its 2027 operations, the standard Ukrainian agribusiness sentence of this war: good year behind, unpriceable year ahead. CBOT wheat added 1.9% to 695.50 cents/bu, 256 USD/t. Freight leaned the other way, with the Baltic Dry Index at 3,002, down 68 points and at a one-month low.
13:00
Fertilizer did nothing loudly. Urea slipped 1.5% to 440 USD/t, DAP sat still at 802.50 USD/t for a second session, and sulphur in China was unchanged at 7,702.33 CNY/t, 1,151 USD/t. The physical news came from Bangladesh, where DENZAI completed heavy lifting and transport works to install a new pool condenser at KAFCO, the ammonia-urea complex at Chattogram. Potash has no public print today; free sources are down, and the last reliable screen is what desks are quoting off.
15:30
Cloudflare published the receipts for its Birthday Week: 46 announcements in one week, product launches, features and updates collected into a single recap for anyone whose feed moved faster than their reading. For traders running their own tooling on edge compute, the relevant line is that most of the shipping happened in the dashboard and agent surfaces rather than the raw platform.
Left on the board
- Westwin Elements completed a bankable feasibility study for a 502 million USD nickel refinery at Natchez, Mississippi.
- Barrick secured 15-year mining licences for North Mara in Tanzania, removing tenure risk over a first-half production decline.
- Kananga, Kasaï Central: a 164 million USD programme to lift potable water capacity to 125,000 m³/day.
- CPKC posted record September and third-quarter grain volumes.
- Antofagasta prosecutors detained the operating arm of a ring stealing copper from mine sites and trains.
- Sugar #11 at 20.86 cents/lb, 460 USD/t, up 0.6%; palm oil 4,560 MYR/t, 1,117 USD/t, down 0.4%.