The following are futures positions of non-commercials as of April 26, 2016. Change is week-over-week.
Crude oil: There goes $43.50 on spot West Texas Intermediate crude. This resistance goes back to January last year, and, in fact, can be extended to even July 2004.
Technically, crude momentum is intact. That said, Friday, a high-volume session, produced a long-legged doji – first sign of distribution in a while.
This week, help came from the U.S. dollar.
Fundamentally, data were mixed at best.
For the week ended April 22nd, crude inventory rose by another two million barrels to 540.6 million barrels. In the past 16 weeks, stocks have gone up by 58.3 million barrels, and are inching ever closer to the all-time high 545 million barrels in 1929.
Also not helping matters were gasoline stocks, which increased 1.6 million barrels to 241.3 million barrels. And refinery utilization fell 1.3 percentage points to 88.1 percent. Utilization has dropped by 3.3 percentage points in the past three weeks.
On the positive column, distillate stocks fell 1.7 million barrels to 158.2 million barrels. Crude imports fell 637,000 barrels per day to 7.6 million b/d.
Last but not the least, crude production dropped 15,000 b/d to 8.9 mb/d. This was the third straight week of sub-nine mb/d. Production peaked at 9.61 mb/d in the June 5th week last year, so has declined by more than 600,000 b/d.
Spot WTI (45.99) began its freefall in June 2014, dropping from 107.68 to the February 11th hammer low of 26.05. A 23.6-percent retracement of the decline puts the crude at 45.31.
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