Leigh Goehring on the Many Factors Sending Oil Prices Higher27 Jun 2021 12:26
http://blog.gorozen.com/blog/leigh-goehring-on-the-many-factors-sending-oil-prices-higher?utm_campaign=Weekly%20Blog%20Notification&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=136200549&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_sPg-5cp3uF-E1MoGZhMsWZuON2bwgdV9cJvBalW6I0BBLx1903M4iEG9iOinXgMdcp_4SPIOhrmN3AaYYLL0E017vKA&utm_content=136200549&utm_source=hs_email
Managing Partners Leigh Goehring and Adam Rozencwajg recently hosted a video conference call along with Stacy Havener, CEO and Founder of Havener Capital Partners. During the event, they discussed the outlook for different natural resources including oil and copper as well as factors affecting investors such as inflation. Here is Leigh discussing the current state of oil-related equities.
“Oil today is in the class of being an uninvestable asset. And if you just look at the way oil stocks are performing, they've gone up a lot. They've gone up about 120% off their bottoms that were reached back in the beginning part of April of last year. But as far as we can tell, there has been no real buying that has taken place in the oil names. This is hard to believe, but since they bought them back over a year ago, most of the upward pressure on oil stocks has come from short covering from both hedge funds and algorithmic traders who have been massively short the energy space over the last several years. Of course, it's that massive shorting which has made oil stocks such radical underperformers.
And just to give you a statistic to show you that this is indeed true. If you look at the E&P index which is embodied in the XOP ETF, the open interest in that ETF over the last year, since it bottomed back in April last year, is only up 15%. And usually what happens is that when true buying comes to the open interest, ETFs begin to expand. Now, you compare oil relative to copper, where there has been real buying and we'll talk about copper in a minute. For example, the various copper ETFs, their open interest in the copper stock ETFs are up 700% over the last year. Now how'd you like that? 700% versus 15%.
There's no buying taking place with long only fund managers in the oil space. However, that is going to change because the underlying fundamentals in the oil market are excellent. And there's several issues in the oil market today that very, very few people understand. In fact, I would say that next year, we're going to enter a situation in global oil markets where we have never ever been before in the 160 years of history of oil, since it was discovered back in Oil Creek, Pennsylvania 1850 by Colonel Drake.