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Last month, the OPEC+ decision to stay the course on previously announced production cuts pushed the market up. Yesterday, the OPEC+ decision to reverse course and bring more supply online over the next 3 months (May, June, July) resulted in....surprise! The market going up!
WTI jumped over 5% late this morning, as news broke that OPEC+ members would be agreeing not to raise production levels in April. According to reports, the current established levels for each of the member countries will be continuing as is through April and May, and the Saudi's are planning to forge ahead with continuing to keep the additional 1 million barrels per day offline as agreed to for February and March.
Despite today's across the board drops on refined prices, (-.0262 UL & -.0255 RBOB) this week saw oil prices overall continue to tick upward.
Last week's market pushed up on hopes of progress against COVID with vaccine rollouts and encouraging signs of demand growth on fuels. This week however, those hopes were dashed as talk turned to a variant strain of COVID found in the UK that has caused surging infections, and prompted the "Christmas Lockdowns" in other European nations to become increasingly severe. This has all but wiped out any hope of demand stabilizing in the near term.
Markets backed off slightly today across the board. At the close, we saw front month ULSD settle up .0012 to 1.4369 (1.4416 +.0006 for Feb), RBOB dropped .0089 to 1.3077 (-.0087 to 1.3137 for Feb) and WTI closed out at 46.57
Final answers to lingering questions shot markets up today - Oil markets hit an 8 month high and the stock market soared, with the Dow breaking 30,000 for the first time. Airlines, Cruise Lines, and Energy stocks all pushed up on continuing positive news regarding a COVID-19 vaccination.
Today we opened up slightly on the NYMEX, and the big drops kicked in around 11am, (up to almost 3% on WTI temporarily) when Speaker Pelosi announced that they expected "pen on paper" for a second round of stimulus packages. The announcement came as somewhat of a surprise, as much of the activity on the second stimulus as of late has involved blocking, show bills, and discussions of everything being postponed until after the Election (and other typical political maneuvering).
Gasoline hit 5 month highs today, with distillates and Crude following upward as well, as twin storms Marco and Laura continue their trek towards the Gulf.
Oil opened down 6% this morning, and has continued to slide. We are currently off ~7.9% at time of writing (10:30am)
Oil markets were tumbling well before the open today, and unfortunately we didn't see that turn around at all through the course of the official trading day.