Why Do American Presidents ALWAYS Get Oil Wrong?

Oil — really the cost of a unit of energy — affects the cost of EVERYTHING on the planet.

Which means that when oil prices go up, that FINANCIALLY HURTS everyone on the planet…

… including EVERY AMERICAN.

So why is Trump actively trying to drive oil prices higher?  In fact, why do all American presidents feel the need to do this?

I know people will say, “to protect America’s oil producers” … and so that we’re not strategically dependent on foreign oil.

Hogwash.

The way to do this is NOT to artificially raise set prices.  It’s to innovate.

Either we figure out a way to extract oil less expensively…

… or we figure out economically viable energy alternatives…

… say a conversion to natural gas, where we have a 100-year supply… or, electric cars… or solar-driven residential and commercial buildings.

And so on.

Anything but charging Americans MORE, which means we just end up FUNDING THE VERY PEOPLE THAT WANT TO DO US HARM MORE.

Sorry, energy industry.  Innovate or die.  Just like every other industry has had to do.  But don’t drag the rest of the country down with you.

Advertisement

What Does It Mean That OPEC Is So Quiet?

It scares me that OPEC is so quiet.

OPEC countries usually love to grab the spotlight during big meetings (and the media loves to shine the spotlight on anyone that looks anywhere close to being an oil minister!).

That’s not happening for the big confab tomorrow, though… where everyone universally believes OPEC will extend their production cuts.  After all, the leading OPEC members said as much in a press conference on Monday.

Quiet is a bad sign… as is the Middle East unanimously agreeing on anything.

Could there be some hugely negative surprise tomorrow?

There have been little chirps here and there about Iran (the #2 player in OPEC) not wanting production cuts to apply to them…

… but nothing disruptive.  Indeed, everything seems civilized… which is a word not many would associate with the players involved.

Unbelievably, I think there’s a really good reason why OPEC may be in agreement:  The production cuts seem to be working.

Crude oil is trading about 15% higher than before the production agreement was announced last Nov.  Maybe more significantly, it dramatically changed the trend line.  Before the announcement oil was spiraling downward, everyone (there’s that “universally” thing again) was sure it would soon be trading in the 30’s.  OPEC’s agreement seemed to single-handedly stop the decline in its tracks…

… and there in lies the major motivation for cooperation:  Oil in the 50’s is a lot better than oil in the 30’s.

Guess we’ll see how it plays out in the next 24 hours or so.

 

OPEC Games?

To say the oil market is sensitive to news coming out of the Middle East is an understatement.

In November I wrote, “If I Were A Bad (Oil) Guy“… essentially wondering if countries in the Middle East might be jerking oil markets around on purpose to earn a little side money.

Guess we’ll find out this week… there’s another very big meeting on Thursday… and while everything seems quite hunky-dory right now… it will be interesting to see if anyone tries to upset the oil cart this week.

Stay tuned.

P.S.  It’s quite possible that something like this already happened… UWT (which tracks crude oil 3x) was trading just under 23 about a month ago… about two weeks ago it his just above 13.50… that’s a pretty sizable drop in such a short period of time.

There Is Something Wrong With WTI, UWTI, and DWTI

UWTI and DWTI are wildly popular 3x ETF’s that track WTI oil.

That means they approximate three times the daily move by WTI oil… and there’s a lot of daily volume so there are no weird trading patterns.

WTI was up about 0.33% today, which means UWTI should have been up about 1% today… and DWTI should have been down about 1%.

But, UWTI was up about 5.5%… while DWTI was down about 5.5%.

That makes no sense.  I’ve tracked these ETFs daily for years and I’ve never seen this.

There are some extracurriculars going on here, most notably it was announced yesterday that Credit Suisse AG is going to shut down the wildly popular UWTI and DWTI ETFs.  I don’t think this affected price because if it did, it would have had an equally negative impact on both.   Instead, both issues had completely mirrored performance today, just as you would expect — only, the mirrored performance was off by almost 6x!

Also, it could have been some kind of rumor out of the “practice” meeting at Doha, but, if that were the case, that would have affected WTI price first, which it did not… WTI was relatively calm today.

I’m trying to figure out whether this is one of those rare times when some kind of inefficiency affected price.  If that’s true, you would expect a snap back rather suddenly on Monday, possibly an interesting trading opportunity.  Problem with that thinking is these ETFs trade in such high volume, that kind of inefficiency is almost impossible.

This one certainly has me scratching my head.

Time To See If Contrarian Theory Works In Oil

OPEC just announced some “kinda” agreement about production levels and freeze.

Oil just skyrocketed on the potential “news” (up 5.3% @ $47.05 for the Nov ’16 contract).

Everyone has been waiting for this moment… a signal from OPEC that the strategy it’s employed the last few years is changing.

Everyone — 100% of all analysts — have come out saying this will put a floor under oil prices now.

The contrarian in me says when everyone thinks one way, the opposite usually happens.

What could possibly go wrong?

Maybe this inspires more U.S. shale oil to be produced… that was one of the reasons oil dropped from the triple digits not so long ago.

Maybe the “cuts” aren’t real cuts, just natural scale-back given the time of year (between summer driving and winter heating)… so any temporary euphoria in the market will soon get replaced with the commonsense observation that everyone is still pumping at near-record levels.

Maybe it’s just all of the OPEC members playing games with each other — and the world — again.

Who knows, but it will be interesting to see!