Crude Oil The story of yesterday was “OPEC delivered an ‘oil cut’ in its statement”. OPEC announced that from January 2017, it would restrict production to 32.5 MBpd. The market duly cheered it by climbing to fresh, month long highs. The February Brent future settled at $ 51.84 / bbl. This is not shown in the graph below as the January future expired yesterday. Yesterday’s up move was the largest one day move since…
Read MoreCrude Oil Yesterday was the turn of the naysayers as Crude Oil prices sank like a rock registering the biggest single day decline since September As we were commenting, OPEC producers continue to find it difficult to reach a consensus on production cuts. This continuing apparent lack of will will make the market even more reluctant to believe a statement of consensus if one is reached today. In other supportive news, API reported a drop…
Read MoreCrude Oil The weight of the OPEC meeting on market sentiment was never more apparent than today as crude recovered almost all its losses on Friday. To us, reaching a meaningful consensus that will support price looks extremely difficult to us. For one, Saudi Aramco said that it expects the market to rebalance itself anyway in 2017 therefore a cut may not be necessary. This may be advance posturing in defence of its decision…
Read MoreCrude Oil Crude Oil once again gave up a lot of its gains at the start of the week as the ‘Will they, won’t they” phenomenon reared its ugly head once again. At the end of the week, the markers were up around 20 cents (Brent) and 13 cents (WT) respectively with the speculators having had a good time in the volatility. Apart from what OPEC does, there were reports that China’s crude oil…
Read MoreCrude Oil With the US closed for the Thanksgiving holiday yesterday there was very little activity in the markets yesterday All eyes are on OPEC as we head towards the end of November as there appears to be no bottom currently should there be no attempt to limit supply. As of now all efforts are on to rope in all participants into this activity. The general expectation is that OPEC should cut output along…
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