Crude price

The price of a barrel of oil. There are dozens of so-called benchmarks, for various global markets, but there are only four major ones. These are the symbols on the NYMEX:


 * CL — West Texas Intermediate or WTI, light sweet crude
 * BZ — Brent look-alike crude oil futures
 * DC — Dubai crude calendar futures
 * WCC — Canadian Heavy (differential)

There are others, not yet available in the Volume* app (though MB and RE are in the dev version now):


 * MB — Gulf Coast Sour Crude
 * BB — Brent crude penultimate financial futures
 * WCE — Western Canadian select crude oil futures (differential) — but this seems to be the same price as WCC, which can't be right
 * RE — Russian Export Blend Crude Oil (REBCO) futures

Other symbols may be used on other exchanges, for example B for Brent on the Intercontinental Exchange, ICE.

Natural gas
Spot prices for natural gas work in the same way.


 * NG — Henry Hub physical futures
 * HH — Henry Hub last day financial futures
 * LN — European options

Web API for oil price
All this info is used in the mobile app Volume* to grab the latest oil price.

You can query Yahoo finance for futures prices with a simple call to their web API: Yahoo Finance quotes for Brent and WTI

Today this returns:  112.95 96.65

Note in the Volume* app, I grab two prices, because I always want to know WTI, just in case.

The ticker symbol we're passing look like XXMYY.NYM, with components as follows:


 * XX — commodity symbol, as above: CL, WCC, etc.
 * M — a month code, symbolizing January to December: F,G,H,J,K,M,N,Q,U,V,X,Z (there are lots of letter missing)
 * YY — a two-digit year, like 13.
 * NYM — the Nymex symbol.

Current prices

 * /CL/
 * /BZ/
 * /DC/
 * /WCC/

NB WCC is reported by Yahoo as a differential; it has been added to the CL price for actual market price.