Brent crude fell to $109.38 a barrel by 9:45 a.m. on Monday, November 2, 2026, down $4.05, or 3.57%, as diplomacy moved the price. The contract traded as low as $108.93 and as high as $112.38.
October closed at six-month highs. November has opened with a pullback.
Reuters reports that Iranian officials and Qatari mediators have held a third straight day of talks aimed at ending the war pitting the United States and Israel against Iran. Tehran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, calls them “ongoing and progressing” and says the country is ready “for both defense and diplomacy”. Over the weekend, according to Axios, Donald Trump told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone that he wanted to allow more time for negotiations.
Why Brent is falling
The rally of recent weeks had carried Brent back toward its highest levels since April, and a good part of it was risk premium: the extra the market will pay to protect itself against a halt in supplies from the Gulf. Let escalation look slightly less imminent and some of that surcharge evaporates.
Traders are also taking profits. Tim Waterer, chief analyst at KCM Trade, reads the session as a “technical retracement after the strong gains of last week”, as quoted by Reuters.
On some charts the drop looks far steeper, at around 7%. That gap is mechanical, not a collapse others have missed. On Friday, October 30, 2026, the December delivery contract expired, as set out in ICE’s Brent futures contract rules, under which trading closes on the last business day of the second month preceding delivery. That contract settled at $117.64. The January contract, now the benchmark, had ended at $113.43. Measure today’s price against the old expiry and you carry a gap of roughly $4 that has nothing to do with this morning’s market: the rollover effect.
Drivers hoping for a cheaper fill-up will have to wait. Gasoline and diesel follow crude with a lag and with dynamics of their own, as we have explained in looking at why pump prices do not follow Brent.
The risks still on the table
Hormuz remains the most exposed point. On Friday the Qatari LNG tanker Al-Mayeda was struck by “unidentified objects” while crossing Gulf waters, with no injuries according to the Qatar News Agency. On Sunday the British agency UKMTO picked up a Mayday from a merchant vessel reporting another ship hit by a projectile in the Strait, and, again according to UKMTO, a vessel was struck east of Ras Al Khafji, on the Saudi coast. The Revolutionary Guards (the IRGC, Iran’s elite military force) tell a different story: two tankers, they say, hit mines after taking an “unauthorized” route. The accounts do not match.
Then there is the vote. On Tuesday, November 3, 2026, Americans go to the polls for the midterm elections, and, again according to Axios, Netanyahu has asked Trump to resume airstrikes immediately afterward. ING says the market is increasingly preparing “for the possibility of renewed hostilities between the US and Iran”. Waterer flags the risk that rhetoric hardens after the midterms and pushes Brent back toward $120.
Supply held no surprises. On Sunday, November 1, 2026, seven OPEC+ countries (Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Oman) confirmed September’s production targets for December. The real contest comes on November 29, when the full group meets and the 2027 production framework is expected to take shape. Jorge Leon of Rystad Energy put it this way: Sunday’s was “the easy decision”.
The technical picture
Money.it’s latest technical analysis uses data from October 30, 2026, so it does not account for today’s session. The levels still say plenty. The first support, at $110.82, was lost in the opening hours of trading. The second, at $109.32, was pierced at the morning low, and the price is now oscillating around it. Break that decisively and the next reference is the 50-day moving average, around $103.48, a level that leaves room for a broad correction without breaking the underlying trend. The 200-day moving average sits much further down, at $92.66.
Above, the first resistance is at $114.06 and the second at $115.80. Getting back there would require the risk premium to be priced back in, meaning news from the Gulf would have to turn worse again. Anyone working on a longer horizon can compare these levels with estimates from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citi, and the EIA.
Today’s decline prices in a deal that does not yet exist. Tehran’s first condition is an end to the American naval blockade of its ports, and Araghchi has ruled out any meetings with US officials for now. If the Doha channel holds past Tuesday, $110 could become the new equilibrium. If the military front takes over again, the premium that left the price in a single morning can come back just as fast.
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Editor’s note
This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Ufficio Studi Money.it on November 02, 2026 as «Petrolio, il Brent scende sotto 110 dollari: il mercato sgonfia il premio di rischio sull’Iran». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.
