Does crude oil get wilder on full moon days?
No difference
This page presents historical statistics only — not investment advice or timing signals.
WTI crude (U.S. benchmark)
- Average daily move
- 1.79%
- Full moon days (±24h)
- 1.81%
- New moon days (±24h)
- 1.83%
- Verdict for full moon days
- No difference
Brent crude (European benchmark)
- Average daily move
- 1.66%
- Full moon days (±24h)
- 1.65%
- New moon days (±24h)
- 1.74%
- Verdict for full moon days
- No difference
Data: 1987–2026, EIA spot prices, 9,738 trading days
Act II: If not the moon, what moves it?
Came looking for a difference? Here is a real one.
×9.3
On its wildest 1% of days — financial crises, OPEC supply shocks, wars, the COVID crash — WTI moved about 9.3x its normal range. What moves crude is not the lunar cycle but geopolitics and supply-and-demand news.
The extreme case was April 20, 2020: WTI fell below zero for the first time in history — to -37.0 dollars a barrel. It wasn't the moon; there was simply nowhere left to store the oil.
Crude isn't watching the moon. It's watching OPEC meetings and the headlines.
The folklore that "markets get wild on full moons"
Markets have long carried the lore that "full and new moons are turning points" and "volatility rises on full-moon days," and plenty of indicators overlay the lunar phase on price charts. The claim has been aimed not only at stocks and currencies but at crude oil — the thermometer of the world economy. Because oil reacts sharply to geopolitics, weather, and supply and demand, it is fertile ground for the impression that "the full moon stirs it up." This page tests that question daily for WTI (the U.S. benchmark) and Brent (the European benchmark).
How the verdict is computed
- The data is daily spot prices published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) — WTI since 1986, Brent since 1987, an official public record
- We test the size of the move, not its direction: for each trading day we take the absolute value of the day-over-day percent change (how much it moved that day)
- Oil has its own weekday and seasonal patterns, so the expected value is the average of the "same weekday × same month," and we compare actual ÷ expected as an index (the same adjustment as the FX topic)
- Using the lunar phase around the U.S. market close, we classify full-moon days (within ±24h of the instant) and new-moon days, and compare each group's mean index against normal (1.00)
See the methodology for the verdict thresholds.
A few caveats
- This page presents historical statistics only — it is not investment advice. Even if the verdict were something other than "no difference," that would not mean a tradable edge
- We test only whether price moves are visibly larger on calendar full-moon days; we make no claim about lunar-indicator trading methods
Sources
- U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) — WTI (Cushing) and Brent (Europe) daily spot prices (U.S. government, public domain; usable with attribution)
- Moon phase instants computed in-house from Jean Meeus, "Astronomical Algorithms" (UTC)
Last updated: June 13, 2026 08:00 UTC (rebuilt daily)