Crude oil price: 5 years chart of performance

Oil is often reffered to as “black gold”. This page is about the past 5 years of the unprocessed form of crude light oil which is traded worldwide in the unit of bbl (1 US bbl oil = 158.99 l) and in the currency of USD.

5 year chart of crude oil future*

The 5 year chart of crude oil future summarizes the chages in the price well, however, we recommend to have a look at the chart(s) below, too.

5 year price chart of 1 barrel crude oil 5 year price chart of 1 barrel crude oil

(Prices are in US dollars)

You can find other oil charts from intraday up to 3 year here.

Crude oil future’s long term yield chart*

People often say that long term investments carry less risk than short term ones.
Well, on the chart below you can see if that is true for yourself in the case of crude oil for the past 5 years.

Annualized 3 and 5 years return of crude oil future value in the past 5 years Annualized 3 and 5 years return of crude oil future value in the past 5 years

What can you see on this chart?

You can calculate oil’s 1 month return from oil’s price today and oil’s price 30 days ago. You can also do the same calculation for yesterday and oil’s price 31 days ago etc. If you do this calculation for each days, you will get a curve of oil’s 1 month yield. The same applies to other yield periods from three months to five ears.

This chart shows each yield curve in the past 5 years. It helps you to highlight how stable profits were.

Crude light oil price vs. inflation

Changes of price in case of crude oil price does not carry too much meaning unless we compare it to something else like Customer Price Index (CPI), or an other index.
So this chart shows crude light oil price’s relative change against the US customer price index in the past 5 years.

Crude oil future value compared to US CPI / index in a 5 years chart Crude oil future value compared to US CPI / index in a 5 years chart

*charts are updated every month, and they have been created by using Chartoasis Sesame. If you feel like analyzing oil’s historical prices, you can do that for free at www.chartoasis.com/sesame .