Equinor Says Its Trading Business Will Beat Q3 Guidance

Equinor’s trading arm is about to beat its guidance again. The Norwegian energy group said Wednesday that its marketing, midstream and processing division — home to the company’s energy trading business — should report a third-quarter result above the $400 million marker, with unusually strong European refining margins and optimized LNG trading doing the heavy lifting.

The signal came in Equinor's quarterly update to analysts ahead of its third-quarter results, due October 28 at 07:00 CEST. In the update, the company said the segment's third-quarter result "is expected to be above guidance of USD 400 million," pointing to "unusually strong European refining margins combined with optimisation of equity and thirdparty LNG trading."

A familiar pattern

This is not the first time the trading arm has outrun its marker. In the second quarter, the same segment delivered $777 million of adjusted operating income — nearly double the guidance level — after what CFO Torgrim Reitan described as a trading result almost twice what Equinor books in a normal quarter. That performance helped the company double its 2026 share buyback to $3 billion.

The bar was set deliberately low. After the third quarter of 2025, Equinor cut the segment's quarterly guidance to an average adjusted operating income of around $400 million, down from a $400 million to $800 million range — so this quarter's expected beat lands against a baseline the company itself had already marked down.

Why the quarter worked

The backdrop cooperated. Equinor said average Dated Brent ran at $97 a barrel through the quarter, and European refining margins were unusually strong. LNG trading benefited from a tight European gas market — the same dislocation that, in the second quarter, the company said stemmed from LNG supply disruption following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

The rest of the update sketched a softer upstream picture: estimated realized liquids prices of $97–99 a barrel in Norway, $81–85 internationally and $72–74 in the United States, with underlifts in Norway and international operations and U.S. turnarounds trimming output. Norwegian petroleum tax installments for the quarter totaled $6.1 billion.

The October 28 checkpoint

The full third-quarter report lands October 28 at 07:00 CEST, when investors will see the exact figure behind today's expected beat — and whether trading strength offsets the production-side softness. TickerGrove's read: the trading arm has quietly become Equinor's most reliable source of upside. But a beat built on volatile margins and arbitrage is, by definition, hard to repeat.