Malcy9 Feb 2015 13:00
Oil price
Crude oil rose all but one day last week with Brent up 9.1%, 18% on a fortnight giving some traders reason to believe that the worst is behind us. Certainly the chartists I talked about last Monday are getting quite excited, for them the Brent resistance level of $56.99 has been busted and onward progress looks imminent, I am not quite so confident yet… Blackrock say that inflows into their energy related exchange traded products were a record $3.7bn in January, echoing what I have been saying about money managers in general upping their exposure to the sector and indeed what Daniel Och said in his Reuters interview last week.
But if you look at the available US statistics on Friday you are right to be bullish, first the non-farm payroll not only cruised past the whisper at 257/- new jobs but decent additions were made to the November and December numbers as well. After that the Baker Hughes rig count, a new best friend for previously uninformed analysts, came in at a drop of 87 rigs (83 of them in oil) to see a fall of 284 since November the 21st. It is without doubt fair to say that it will take time for these falls to feed through to a fall in US production but it will do in time, probably in conjunction with other capex reductions around the world, at which time it will be time to push the panic button as is so often the case. Finally, the last remaining export route for onshore Libyan crude was shut off at the weekend when Hariga port was closed by terrorist attacks thus virtually ceasing any exports from the country.
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