Replies to post #3279 on Oil & Gas - Energy - Commodities - Resources (OILBRENT)

[DiscoverGold]

Peek Into Crude Oil Future Through Futures

* March 19, 2016

The following are futures positions of non-commercials as of March 15, 2016. Change is week-over-week.

Crude oil: Spot West Texas Intermediate crude broke out of first $38 and then $40. A couple of things helped.

First, until Tuesday, spot WTI was unchanged for the week. Then came the FOMC statement, and the resulting dollar slump. This was a big tailwind for commodities, including oil.

Second, market continues to focus on the positives.

In the week ended March 11th, gasoline stocks dropped another 747,000 barrels to 249.7 million barrels. In the past month, stocks have shrunk by nine million barrels, although from a record high.

Distillate stocks, too, fell – by 1.1 million barrels to 161.3 million barrels.

Crude imports fell by 355,000 barrels per day to 7.7 mb/d. Crude imports have fallen by 599 b/d in the past couple of weeks.

And, crude production fell by 10,000 b/d to 9.1 mb/d. Production reached a record 9.61 mb/d in the June 5th (2015) week.

Refinery utilization fell one-tenth of a percent to 89 – a slight negative.

The biggest negative came in the form of crude stocks, which rose by another 1.3 million barrels to a record 523.2 million barrels. Inventory is now up nearly 41 million barrels in the past 10 weeks. Traders for now have decided to completely ignore this data point.

There is increasing optimism that the April 17th meeting in Doha among producers from within and outside OPEC results in output freeze.

Mid-February, Saudi Arabia and fellow OPEC members Qatar and Venezuela agreed with Russia, non-OPEC, to freeze output at January levels. Iran is not going along. Rather, it increased production by 187,800 b/d to 3.13 mb/d last month. Likewise, Saudi Arabia’s output stood at 10.23 mb/d in January. They are all trying to increase production – just in case there is a deal to freeze output.

On Friday, spot WTI was less than a percent away from testing the 200-day moving average, and was rejected. Potentially an important reversal near-term.

In the meantime, XLE, the SPDR energy ETF, tagged its 200-DMA on both Thursday and Friday, and looks tired.

Non-commercials continue to add net longs – now at 21-week high.

Currently net long 267.4k, up 33.2k.



http://www.hedgopia.com/cot-peek-into-future-through-futures-35/

• George.

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