Mark Le Dain, vice chairman of strategy with the oil and gas data firm Validere: The financial price for crude delayed well above the physical. Where many producers were getting single digits. Tons of this is often thanks to an inflow of funds into the financial. We expect this may stop when these new buyers realize.
The costly roll of the contracts related to tons of the general public instruments they’re using. With the contango within the market, when an exchange-traded fund (ETF) like us Oil Fund (USO) rolls the contracts, you’re effectively buying high and selling low. I’m not certain tons of the retail investors that have added instruments. Like that understand how the curve structure impairs their returns, and that I worry they’re going to be surprised.
The weekly U.S. Department of Energy
The weekly U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report was mostly ignored as what was seen was already within the price structure of the market. However, a couple of surprises were seen within the report. First, domestic crude production declined 700,000 bpd in last week’s report, yet it only declined another 100,000 bpd within the report today. Crude imports declined to round the 5.7 million-bpd level but crude exports remain high at 3.436 million bpd in an arena that has not much thirst for crude.
Distillate stocks build by 6.3 million and distillate demand declined by over 1 million bpd. This was somewhat understandable with the milder weather we saw within the U.S. last week lowering the heating demand. At a better level than the present 2.757 million bpd shown within the DOE report.
Seng: U.S. imports of oil from Saudi Arabia jumped to about 830,000 bpd in March vs. 370,000 bpd in February and are estimated to possess been 12 million barrels for the primary week of April alone.
Goldstein: Although it’s known that the shortage of demand is increasing. Thanks to COVID-19, the 19.5-million-barrel integrates crude and nearly 5 million-build. In gasoline inventories were surprising numbers. OPEC sees demand dropping to its lowest level in 30 years.