Oil prices affected by yearly forecasts

Malcolm Graham-Wood Independent Analyst

If only the Vampire squids had known how their 2018 oil price forecasts would have affected the market they might have been able to make a good trade out of it and resurrect their awful commodity trading performance, or maybe they did……………

As I had suggested the big guns were wheeled out yesterday to back up the Opec/Non-Opec adherence after the recent price fall. The Iraqi minister said that they were in full compliance (they had been suspected of overproducing) and that there would be no reappraisal of quotas until December. The Opec Secretary General said that the recent fall was ‘merely a blip’ and the Russian Energy Minister said that global energy stocks were still trending lower.

The IEA report was mixed, on the upside it lifted world demand numbers and were added to the list of the 100 club, ie the world demand will break 100m b/d by the end of this year, they also noted that inventories were down. On the downside they also joined the EIA in increasing their US production numbers which came as no surprise.

During the day prices drifted but rallied off the lows, after hours though the API stats showed higher stock builds than expected at +3.9m and also in gasoline +4.6m which need to be verified by the EIA tonight. It won’t be long before spring refinery maintenance starts to rear its ugly head and demand for crude drops, albeit temporarily.

Author

Malcolm Graham-Wood

Independent Analyst

Malcolm Graham-Wood started his City career as a trainee analyst at Wood Mackenzie and then cut a swathe through a number of broking houses, all the time building up his knowledge and love of the upstream oil and gas industry incl

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