September 10, 2026

I covered here in June 2026 how the upturn in oil prices was on time, but the magnitude was overly amplified by the war with Iran.  Now oil prices are starting upward again after a pullback, and this is going to be a much longer uptrend.  That is the message of gold's 20-month leading indication shown in this week's chart.

This is a relationship I discovered years ago, when looking at gold and oil prices on a long term chart.  I was not using the time offset then, but when I tilted my head to the side I could see that a better alignment of the chart patterns of each plot could be achieved with a slight adjustment.  After some tinkering, I found that a lag time of 19.8 months seemed to get the best overall fit, although that lag time is not perfect all the time.  Sometimes oil's price turns arrive a little bit early or late versus the ideal lag time.

And sometimes global events amplify the magnitudes of oil price movements in ways that gold's price plot did not foretell.  The start of the war between Ukraine and Russia was a great example.  That event brought a big push higher for oil prices, although interestingly the peak for oil was roughly on time with what gold had said.  A similar warping of the oil price plot has just recently occurred as a result of the Iran war.

From this equivalent point in gold prices 19.8 month ago, gold went on to nearly double by the time it hit its Jan. 29, 2026 all-time high.  THIS DOES NOT MEAN that oil prices have to double from here.  It does not work that way.  Gold tells us about the direction, but the magnitudes of the movements do not have to match 1-for-1.  And as discussed above, the magnitudes can get warped by events gold did not know about months before.

A better use of this relationship is to note the direction of travel, and the timing of the turns that gold's price plot tell us about for oil.  And on that point, we can expect a continued uptrend for a long time to come.  Counting forward 20 months from gold's January 2026 top gets us to about late September 2027 for an oil price top.

Tom McClellan
Editor, The McClellan Market Report
www.mcoscillator.com