Tonight's tape split crude from its products. Brent settled at 96.37 and WTI at 88.99, up just 0.57% and 0.28% on the day — essentially flat. Yet fuel oil printed 4,236 yuan per tonne, +3.04%, and bitumen 4,413, +0.87%. The product side ran well ahead of the feedstock.

Strip it to the bare math: take a product quote, subtract the landed crude cost, and the simple crack spread flipped from negative to positive today. For three weeks independent refiners were squeezed on both ends — buying crude in dollars, selling product in yuan — so any currency wobble thinned margins. Products outrunning crude finally gave the processing margin some relief.

What holds this spread is where residue ends up. Bitumen faces the road off-season with inventories quick to build; fuel oil sits between bonded bunker restocking and coking feed, and whoever grabs the residue defends the spread. Watch the Brent-WTI gap — it held at 7.38 dollars, so the light-sweet premium has not broken and short-haul economics stay intact.

For traders running arbitrage, this spread and the landed cost are two separate books. Crude rose little and the yuan barely moved (USD/CNY 6.6726), so the yuan-denominated Brent landed cost sits near 4,713 yuan per tonne — not much cheaper than last week. The feedstock window is only half open; products need to push the spread a bit further.