Commodity roundup, August 2026: copper, tin and silver set records
The World Bank published its August 2026 commodity prices on 2 September 2026. Of the 70 benchmark series in the Pink Sheet, 47 rose on the month and 23 fell. Three set nominal all-time highs in the same month: copper at $14,326 a tonne on the London Metal Exchange cash quote, tin at $55,385 a tonne, and fishmeal at $2,500 a tonne CIF Hamburg. A nominal record is not an inflation-adjusted one, and the gap matters: each of those pages shows the real peak in constant dollars beside the nominal figure, and the two are often decades apart.
The largest monthly gains were fishmeal, up 19% to $2,500 a tonne; European gas at the Dutch TTF hub, up 17% to $21.11 per million British thermal units; world raw sugar, up 12% to $0.38 a kilogram; silver, up 11% to $65.40 a troy ounce; platinum, up 10% to $1,780 a troy ounce; and Brent crude, up 9% to $90.90 a barrel. Over twelve months the ranking is different again: European gas leads at 89%, then silver at 71%, tin at 64% and copper at 48%. Note that the two gas benchmarks moved in opposite directions in the same month — TTF up 17%, US Henry Hub down 4% to $2.77 — which is the clearest monthly reminder that there is no single world gas price, only regional ones tied to pipelines and liquefaction capacity.
The largest monthly falls were the Kolkata tea auction, down 9% to $2.85 a kilogram; palm kernel oil, down 6% to $2,264 a tonne; bananas landed in the United States, down 6% to $1.10 a kilogram; Henry Hub gas; coconut oil, down 4% to $1,853 a tonne and down 32% over twelve months, the steepest annual fall of any series; and urea, down 3% to $390 a tonne and down 23% on the year. Coconut oil and palm kernel oil are the two lauric oils and are close substitutes, so they usually move together; when one falls further than the other, the spread tends to close.
Every figure above is a monthly average of a published benchmark, not a spot quote, and every one of them lags the physical market. The full table of all 70 series, with one, twelve, sixty and one hundred and twenty month changes and a five-year sparkline for each, is on the prices dashboard. What moves each of these prices, in mechanisms rather than narrative, is on the individual commodity pages under “What moves the price”.
Commodities in this post
Prices are monthly benchmark averages that lag the market; informational only, not investment advice.