Tag Archives: Oil price risk

Commodity price, Energy crisis, Market trends, Oil market

More bad news from Saudi Arabia

 

Over the years I’d highlighted the increasingly dubious status of Saudi Arabia as the world’s oil production powerhouse. This year we learned that their flagship oil field Ghawar produced much less than everyone knew, now courtesy of Bloomberg we find another disconcerting bit of information corroborating these doubts as the following chart illustrates:

SaudiCrudeStockPile

There can be little doubt that we are facing a grave and serious energy predicament going forward. Our economies and societies better begin preparing yesterday. Links to my research outlining the fundamental supply and demand conditions can be found here: Continue reading →

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Commodity price, Commodity risk, Complexity, Economics, Expertise, Hedging, Market psychology, Market research, Market trends, Oil market, Risk management, Trend following

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.

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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 →

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Commodity price, Commodity risk, Energy crisis, Hedging, Market psychology, Market trends, Oil market, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

Six Principles To Adopting Best Practices In Commodity Price Hedging

  • This week Sinopec disclosed the latest hedging mishap, losing $690 million amid last year’s oil price collapse.
  • Unless price risk management is organized as an integral part of core business operations, it can devolve into eratic and risky game of speculation that can cause massive damage.
  • The six simple but important guiding principles could help commodity firms create a world class risk management process and turn price risk into a source of value and competitive advantage.

This week Sinopec disclosed that it had incurred $690 million in losses in the fourth quarter of 2018. The losses were attributed to Unipec’s oil hedging bets. Unipec clearly took the wrong directional exposure to oil prices in the period when they staged a sharp, 40% collapse (October-December 2018). This much is understandable. However, such losses did not need to happen – I maintained heavy exposure to oil prices over the same period and not only avoided heavy losses but actually generated significant profits by simply adhering to a systematic trend-following model.

Continue reading →

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