I am not a trader, nor an analyst. Technically speaking, I have only worked for an Investment Bank once in my life and that too on the margin trading and risk management desk. I am good with numbers and while I have done well with Excel, Lotus 123 and Symphony, I am not the distinguished looking dude on national television you see being asked about his opinion about Oil. I don’t move markets and I am terrible at trading stocks, options, futures and other exotic contracts. Irrespective of the commodity or the market involved the one thing I have been really good at is losing money.
So how did I get stuck with Oil Insights?
About 18 months ago in August 2008, the business I ran and the country I lived in took an enormous hit because Oil started trading in triple figures. My life was much too interesting before Peak Oil for me to have bothered understanding what made Oil move. But once I figured that my continued well being was now directly related to my ability to personally hedge myself against future oil shocks, Oil became an active interest. It took a few months to identify data sources and some of the more obvious dynamics behind oil. Then a year of covering and following oil to figure out that it wasn’t just oil that was moving, pick any commodity and you could model a relationship if you really tried. And with it the interest extended from crude oil to gold, from gold to edible palm oil, from palm oil to grains and cereals and from cereals to coal.
The journey to decipher oil and the markets oil impacts took more than a year. I was lucky and I had a lot of help. This blog is an effort to track that pilgrimage. I hope that the work done here will help more people understand why our world and oil will never be the same again.
Welcome to Oil Insights.