Thursday's book, told in the figures that moved it.
412.6 MILLION DOLLARS
That is what the Congolese coalition Le Congo n'est pas à vendre says Kinshasa has forgone since 2024 under avenant 5 to the Sino-Congolese convention, in an updated mini-report circulated this week. The mechanism is the complaint: article 1, paragraph 2 fixes infrastructure financing at 324 million USD when copper trades at 8,000 USD per tonne, obliges both sides to absorb the shortfall if the price slips even a dollar below that, and pays the Congolese side nothing extra until copper clears 12,000 USD. Copper has spent the interval well north of 8,000 and short of the upper trigger, so the financing line behaves, in the coalition's phrase, as if copper were still 8,000. Thursday's COMEX print was 6.58 USD/lb, or 14,506 USD/t.
918,364 TONNES
US Gulf coal loaded for China in January to September 2026, against 51,726 tonnes in the same months a year earlier, with August and September alone supplying roughly 76% of the total. The context is the 25 September White House announcement that China will take at least 10 million tonnes of US coal in each of 2027 and 2028, with Beijing's commerce ministry adding coal to its reciprocal tariff-reduction framework three days later. China still accounts for only 4.6% of US Gulf coal exports this year against 9.8% in 2024, and the commitment does not allocate volume by loading coast, which is what decides whether Atlantic owners see any of it. The soybean undertaking alongside it stays at 25 million tonnes a year through 2028.
6.8 PERCENT
The one-day move in CBOT-screen diesel, with ULSD settling at 4.8539 USD/gal, about 1,519 USD/t, from 4.5452 the session before. Gasoline went the other way, RBOB down 2.9% to 3.1532 USD/gal (1,126 USD/t), while Brent added 3.5% to 103.88 USD/bbl. A crude rally that lifts the middle of the barrel and sells the front of it is a heating-and-freight story rather than a driving one, and it lands straight on bunker bills and on every inland haul priced off gasoil.
7,402 YUAN
Chinese sulphur fell 3.9% on the day to 7,402.33 CNY/t, roughly 1,106 USD/t, from 7,702.33. Phosphate downstream is not following it anywhere in a hurry: DAP slipped 0.3% to 800 USD/t and urea held flat at 435 USD/t for a second session. For Gulf sulphur sellers working November tonnes, the buyer's argument this week writes itself.
4,661 RINGGIT
Malaysian palm oil rose 3.0% to 4,661 MYR/t, about 1,140 USD/t, the firmest single move in the edible oils complex on the day. Sugar went the other way, number 11 down 2.8% to 20.14 USc/lb (444 USD/t), even as Südzucker flagged drought damage to European beet in its half-year sales.
500,000 TONNES A YEAR
Gujarat State Fertilizers and Chemicals has opened its half-million-tonne-a-year green ammonia project at Sikka to outside money, inviting global partners to invest. Indian ammonia capacity built for export economics is the slow-moving threat to Gulf urea and ammonia netbacks later this decade, and Sikka sits on the right coast for East Africa.
TEN CENTS
Anthropic halved the price of cache reads on its Sonnet 5.5 model to 0.10 USD per million tokens and released Haiku 5.5 at around 75% less cost to run than its predecessor, with an adjustable effort setting and a tenfold price cut on requests under 100,000 tokens. Max and Team subscribers now get 100 to 500 USD of monthly platform credits on top. The release landed the same week as competing frontier launches, which is how the pricing got to where it is.
Unreconciled
- Chile: a new study puts 5% of national copper output at risk from labour, weather, safety and geology across the biggest mines. Unchanged in direction since earlier coverage.
- Baltic Dry fell 21 points to 2,973, a fourth straight session lower.
- Zimbabwe's lithium export earnings rose on firmer spodumene, including 190 million USD of lithium sulphate sales.
- Congolese diaspora remittances reached 3.318 billion USD in 2025, about 4% of GDP.
- CHS broke ground on a 700 million USD soybean processing plant in Wisconsin.