Both crude grades eased on the dollar board. Brent settled at $103.37/bbl, down $1.34 on the day, and WTI at $95.80/bbl, down $0.69. In absolute terms the Brent–WTI spread compressed from roughly $8.22 to $7.57, with the light-sweet premium over US Gulf heavy narrowing.

But the book is not kept in dollars alone. USD/CNY climbed to 6.6718, up 0.087 from the prior session — a roughly 1.3% softening of the yuan against the dollar. Multiplying Brent back through the exchange rate, the RMB-landed cost rose from about 689.5 yuan/bbl to about 689.6 yuan/bbl, up roughly 0.01% rather than down. The dollar-side discount on crude was eaten by the currency move.

For trading desks running transfer and bonded business, the read is straightforward: the lower dollar quote did not translate into a cheaper RMB-landed barrel, and unhedged front-end exposure actually lost ground to the exchange rate. The feedstock economics of short-haul light-sweet grades (ESPO, Dubai, Oman) only re-open once the yuan firms again or Brent falls further. The window is shut for now.

The heavy-product chain weakened in line with crude today — fuel oil at 4,778 yuan/t (-4.8) and bitumen at 4,915 yuan/t (-2.05) — with none of the earlier counter-trend resilience in the products. The rubber chain split: natural rubber at 19,030 yuan/t slipped slightly while butadiene rubber at 16,370 yuan/t edged up, leaving the NR–BR premium around 2,660 yuan.