WTI Crude Oil Odds on Polymarket: August 2026

As of 2026-08-11 07:49 UTC, Polymarket's "Will WTI Crude Oil hit (HIGH) $85 in August?" trades 87c bid / 88c ask, up from 45.5c a day earlier - a 42c move on a single contract. The mirror-image bet, "hit (LOW) $75," fell from 75c to 48c bid / 49c ask over the same day. Both are reacting to the same three days of news: an Iranian missile strike on a UAE tanker, a hardliner taking charge of Iran's security council, and President Trump firing back at Iran's reparations demand with one of his own. Oil climbed through the weekend and kept climbing Monday into Tuesday. Numbers below are from Gamma and the CLOB order book, fetched at that time.

What actually moved the barrel price

Saturday, August 8: the UAE said Iran struck a tanker linked to its state oil company, ADNOC, with a missile while it was transiting the Strait of Hormuz - by ADNOC's own count, one of well over a dozen such attacks on its vessels since the war began, this one without casualties. Sunday, August 9: Iran named Mohsen Rezaei, a 16-year commander of the Revolutionary Guard, as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, replacing the official who had been running the Hormuz talks - read by observers as hardline forces consolidating control rather than a shift in position. Monday, August 10: Trump responded to Iran's own reparations demand by publicly instructing negotiators to seek compensation from Tehran instead, over decades of attacks he attributed to Iran and its proxies. Brent crude rose more than 4% that day to above $87 a barrel; WTI held near $82. None of the three events alone is a supply shock - no barrel stopped moving because of a personnel change or a Truth Social post - but together they read as a deal getting further away, not closer, and that's what a barrel of oil sitting inside a blockaded chokepoint prices in.

Higher highs, and lower lows getting less likely

Polymarket runs WTI's August range as a ladder of independent yes/no contracts, one per price level: will the month's high touch $85, $90, $95 and up; will the month's low touch $75, $70, $65 and down. As the spot price climbed, the whole ladder repriced at once - upside contracts got more likely, downside contracts got less likely:

Both contracts move on the same underlying number - the barrel price - which is why they trace mirror-image paths. The floor came out first: LOW $75 fell through Saturday and Sunday on the ADNOC strike and the Rezaei appointment, then both contracts snapped hard once Trump's compensation demand landed Monday afternoon, and again in Tuesday's early hours as the story kept developing.

Every level, not just the two nearest the spot price

With WTI trading in the low $80s, the contracts closest to spot moved the most in cents, and the moves shrink the further a level sits from where oil actually is:

WTI CRUDE - WILL AUGUST TOUCH...  PRICE   24H
LOW  $65                           5.5c  -8.0c
LOW  $70                          19.5c -25.0c
LOW  $75                          48.5c -26.5c
HIGH $85                          87.5c +42.0c
HIGH $90                          51.0c +26.5c
HIGH $95                          32.5c +19.5c
HIGH $100                         13.5c  +4.0c

HIGH $85 - the level closest to where oil already sits - is now priced as more likely than not, which is a different claim than "oil will keep rising." A 1-minute candle only has to touch $85 once during the rest of August for this contract to resolve Yes, and the barrel has already been grinding higher through the level's neighborhood this week. HIGH $90 at 51c is the more interesting read: even money that a barrel that traded near $63 a month ago touches $90 before September, entirely on an unresolved chokepoint standoff rather than a demand shock.

Real size, not a headline dragging a thin market

The two most active legs of the ladder carry a 1-2c spread with real depth resting behind it, not a handful of trades pushing a lightly-traded contract:

TOP OF BOOK, 2026-08-11 07:49 UTC
HIGH $85   bid 87c x 4.5    ask 88c x 600    24h vol $96,997
HIGH $95   bid 34c x 0.4    ask 36c x 614    24h vol $166,242
LOW  $75   bid 48c x 39     ask 49c x 710    24h vol $14,468

HIGH $95 - a level oil hasn't come close to yet - is actually the busiest single contract on the ladder, with $166,242 changing hands in the past 24 hours against $96,997 on HIGH $85. That split says traders are positioning on how far this goes, not just confirming what's already close. The whole event has traded $694,874 in the last 24 hours on roughly $1M of resting liquidity, which is a lot of conviction for a market that didn't exist three weeks ago.

One touch, and that leg is done

Each level on this ladder is its own binary contract: it resolves Yes the moment any 1-minute Pyth candle for the active WTI futures month prints a high or low at or beyond that price, and No if August ends without one. That is a strictly weaker bar than "settles above $85" - a single wick touching the level during a volatile hour is enough, even if the price immediately reverses. It also means a level's price only ever tells you the odds of a touch, not of the barrel staying there. HIGH $80 already resolved Yes earlier this month, which is why it no longer trades; the live action has moved to the untouched levels above and below, exactly the ones in the table above.

From the terminal, not a dozen tabs

A dozen related contracts repricing off one news cycle is easy to lose track of one tab at a time. In polymarket-tui, every bracket in an event lists its price and 24-hour move together, so a ladder like WTI's shows up as a shrinking-to-growing gradient of moves around the spot price, not a scavenger hunt through separate market pages.

$ uv tool install polymarket-tui
$ polymarket-tui

The install page has Homebrew and one-liner options.