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Showing posts with the label Crude Oil

Is crude about to go higher?

Since hitting the multi-year low $33.87 measured by front month future contracts trading on ICE on 12/19/08, Western Texas Intermediate ( WTI ) light sweet has been stuck at a trading range between $34 and $48 so far this year. Today front month contract was closed at $33.98, almost exactly the same lowest level occurred two months ago. The most interesting question, intriguing many commodity and equity investors alike, is this the temporary bottom or just the beginning of another leg downward spiral to further unwinding excess bullish positions that had built up prior to the July peak last year . If we examine the current future term structure, we may come out with the conclusions that likely outcome in next few weeks WTI would go higher than lower. Since the term structure shifted from backwardation in late July last year to current contango , the spread between front month and 2 nd month contracts has increased steadily. Today the spread reached highest level, about $8 (see...

Just the beginning ?

As mentioned in my previous post "Natural Gas Momentum Marches on!" in this blog that even though the "speculators" have remained net long futures and option positions in NYMEX (see chart below) based on the data from CFTC as last Tuesday (July 1st), the outstanding contracts for long positions, however, have been closed out continuously in the last 5 weeks. The total contracts of long position declined from over 260,000 to just above 210,000. At the same time period, the short positions remained at relatively consistent level of about 190,000. The nearly $10 slide of Western Texas sweet crude in last two trading sessions (7/7 and 7/8) hardly can be explained by the popular media/talking head's hypotheses, namely dollar related trade, China/India growing demand/limited oil production capacities, mid-East geopolitical tensions etc. True, the greenback has been strengthening since ECB indicated the 25 bp increase on 7/2 might be enough to fend off inflation pr...