Jawwad

Euro gets to the 1.33 zone, oil heads towards sub 80 and Gold after breaching through 1100 will most likely test 1065 within this week. All thanks to Portugal, rising crude inventories and the Greek dash to IMF. It’s good to be back in the game.

This just in – The FOMC meeting keeps the Fed US Policy rate unchanged.

Two off the beaten track articles that are a must read for Crude Oil bears. The first focuses on production and shipments by OPEC members and the first prediction by a serious oil player that prices will crash below 60 US$ by the end of this year and perhaps even lower within the next 5…Read more

What a week it has been. Last night was the first night in 7 days that I slept for 7 hours. My average naptime for the week was an astonishing 4 hours, excluding the time I spent power napping waiting for the red traffic light to change to green, on hold waiting for customers to…Read more

So how cheap is oil in Euro and Yen terms when compared to US Dollar and the Sterling (GBP). The above graph (courtesy of Nauman Khan at InvestBank) shows the relative impact of the US dollar depreciation against the three major currencies across a 10 year period starting January 2000 and ending December 2009. At…Read more

Two items that need special mention today: There has been a fair bit of coverage on the oil less recovery in OECD, especially North America and Western Europe. That talk has been counterbalanced by the belief that the slack in demand in North America would be balanced by the growth in demand in APAC and…Read more

Nauman Khan at InvestBank wrote a note on the relative change in US crude oil inventory on a seasonally adjusted basis when I asked him if the increase in US stock pile was simply a run up to refineries gearing up for their summer production run. Here is what Nauman’s note says:      …Read more

              I am not into fancy arguments. I just need one graph and a handful of facts to make up my mind. Fact number one – The thick red line suggests that end of Q4 2009, the world excess production capacity stood between 5.5 – 6.0 million barrels of…Read more

So if the world economy is so hot and Asia and APAC between themselves will cover the North American and European crude oil demand slack between themselves and more AND oil has nowhere else to go but up, why are Ethylene, EDC, VCM and PVC resin prices heading south in the region?

As expected no major surprises. The outlook stays in low 80’s for 2010 and mid 80’s for Q4 2010, still below the 90 US$ per barrel year end number quoted by BAML earlier in Feb. I on the other hand tend to agree with Oil Trader at the Oil Trader Blog that there is no…Read more