In January last year, Reuters polled 1,000 oil market experts who basically agreed that oil would remain anchored in the $65-$70/bbl range through 2023. Only 3% of these experts thought that oil might rise to $90/bbl or more in 2020. I posted my analysis at this link: Market Fundamentals and Forecasting Groupthink. Later that year I published my own analysis, “Next Move in Oil Prices: $5-$10 Lower,” concluding that, …oil price will likely see another leg down… with Brent falling toward high $40s and WTI toward low $40s. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Market research
Perfect storm gathering: the three converging disruptions
In the near future, we are likely to experience severe consequences of three converging disruptions:
- Stock market crash
- Oil price shock
- Inflation
Since the last recession we’ve enjoyed the longest ever period of economic expansion with low interest rates, low inflation and subdued commodity prices. But this all could be coming to an end.
Bursting of the “everything bubble”
Throughout the west, unprecedented government and central bank stimulus programs helped inflate the current “everything bubble.” This is not a new phenomenon; monetary expansion always creates asset bubbles. The one thing we know is that without exception, asset bubbles ultimately burst. The examples are many and some of them made a mark in the collective conscious of entire generations, from the 1630s Tulip Mania to the 1990s dot-com bubble. Continue reading
Do trend followers move markets? (they do).
A few months ago, when reviewing our trades on US Treasury futures, I was so delighted, I drafted a bragging article titled “How we knew yields would collapse?” summarizing the results of our trading. That performance was entirely generated by my I-System model, first built in 1999. I still find myself awestruck that this works… We generated profitable trades through both the bear and the bull market in bonds, literally without needing to know a single thing about the market fundamentals. The trades were strictly based on the knowledge framework built into the system more than 20 years ago (by the way, our strategies are still generating excellent signals in those same markets). Continue reading
Market fundamentals, forecasting and the groupthink effect
Last month I had the privilege of meeting with Jaran Rystad of Rystad Energy to discuss strategic cooperation between our companies. On the occasion, he gave me a rather detailed presentation of his firm’s energy intelligence database. I must say, in my 20+ years trading in commodities markets this is by far the most impressive product of its kind I’ve ever seen. Even from the software engineering point of view, I was very impressed. For full disclosure, nobody asked nor encouraged me to write this. Much as you’d recommend a restaurant where you ate well or a doctor you respect, I wholeheartedly recommend Rystad Energy as a provider of energy market intelligence as a matter of giving credit where credit is due.
Monaco, June 2019 – with Jarand Rystad
However, even with top notch data on economic supply and demand fundamentals, divining the future remains difficult and unlikely. John von Neumann rightly said that forecasting was “the most complex, interactive, and highly nonlinear problem that had ever been conceived of.” Continue reading
Harnessing market trends to manage commodity price risk
On 24th September 2015, David Stein (M Sc., CFA, President and CEO of Aberdeen International[1]) wrote a compelling article analyzing the expected effect of last year’s VolksWagen emissions scandal on palladium and platinum markets that should be of great interest to commodity traders and industry. Continue reading
Investing in the age of unprecedented monetary experiments
Since the 2008 financial crisis, world’s largest central banks have unleashed a program of monetary stimulus that dwarfs anything we’ve experienced in history. With no historical precedents, how should investors navigate the risks and events that will likely exert extreme stress upon political, economic and social fabric of nations across the world. Altana Wealth’s founder Lee Robinon offers some unorthodox insights in a 45 minute interview with Real Vision TV with Grant Williams. You may not hear similar thinking from academics or CNBC-vetted pundits. Lee has the remarkable capacity to keep a mind-bogglingly detailed mental map of what’s going on in the world of business, finance and politics within a clear historical perspective and isn’t shy about laying it out as he sees it. The video is below: Continue reading
4/5: Sources and quality of oil market information
This posting is part 4 in the 5-part series on the future energy crisis we are likely facing. Here are parts one, two, and three. My research to try and establish facts about oil supply and demand led to many dead-ends where you must take the information at face value and hope that it is true. For example, we’ve all heard (again) about tanker-fulls of unsold crude oil floating around the world, but ultimately, this information was based on hearsay. For example, Bloomberg reported how oil companies are seeking supertankers to store 20 million barrels of crude oil [i] (that sounds like a lot, but it represents only a few hours’ worth of global demand). Continue reading
3/5: Revisiting the peak oil hypothesis
As we discussed in part 1 and part 2 of this series, the world is facing a dire energy predicament; world oil reserves are fast dwindling and new extraction technologies won’t be able to reverse global production declines. By all accounts, it appears that we are past the point of peak oil and today we take another look at the peak oil hypothesis. One of the key thoughts in this report is that, as oil production becomes more expensive in real terms, it must also become more expensive in nominal, or dollar terms. That it has recently become cheaper in dollar terms can only be a temporary aberration. Continue reading
2/5 Oil production and the evolution of drilling technologies
Technology is another element comprising the happy talk about the world’s inehxhaustibly abundant oil supplies. As with Saudi Arabia (and other nations’) reserves, the reality is quite different from what is commonly presented. The argument is that oil reserves calculus changed in the last decades as drilling technologies iproved. That, in part, is how the mushrooming oil reserves numbers are justified even in absence of large new oil field discoveries. Unfortunately, experience hasn’t borne out this optimism and the idea that drilling technologies may have turned Saudi Arabia’s 110 billion barrels of proven reserves into 790 billion barrels is unrealistic, to put it politely. Continue reading
1/5: Making sense of Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves and production capacity
UPDATE: This article is part of a 5-part series posted in 2016. Latest oil market related article is here: “The coming oil price shock”
So, the question is, why did oil prices suddenly collapse in 2014 and continued slumping into 2016? Neither U.S. fracking boom nor the slow demand growth can explain the event’s timing. We’ve known about fracking since at least 2009 and the “boom” part became quite apparent by 2011. The weakness in global demand wasn’t news either, so what did happen in June 2014 when oil prices collapsed? Supposedly, this had something to do with Saudi Arabia’s refusal to curb excess production for whatever reason – there has been no shortage of explanations. Saudi Arabia is the world’s biggest oil producing powerhouse endowed with virtually inexhaustible reserves of the black gold and the capability to switch the taps on or off and move global oil supply and prices at will. That, at any rate is what the mainstream media narrative would have us believe. However, if we scratch the gloss off that narrative, the situation appears starkly different: Continue reading
The Naked Hedgie 