Oil prices have been highly volatile over the past week, with Brent trading across a $6.75 per barrel (bbl) range to hit a seven-month low of $75.05/bbl intra-day on 5 August thanks to bearish news coming from the world’s largest economy. The latest U.S. jobs report revealed that the economy added 114,000 jobs in July, way lower than the Wall Street consensus at 176,000 jobs. The unemployment rate increased to 4.3% from 4.1% the previous month, breaking a previous trend where it remained under 4% for the longest stretch in decades. The bearish jobs and inflation data sent markets into meltdown mode, with markets across the globe tanking.
Oil prices rebounded in Wednesday’s intraday session, with Brent gaining 2.8% to trade at $78.62 per barrel while WTI climbed 3.1% to $75.48 per barrel thanks to growing tensions in the Middle East. According to ING, the Middle East conflict is the biggest bullish catalyst that has halted the oil price selloff, with markets waiting to see Iran’s response to the assassination of Hamas’ political leader by Israel last week. And now commodity analysts at Standard Chartered have revealed that the latest drive lower has been due to a rapid closing out of long positions, not new shorts. StanChart says there have been 135.2 million barrels of long liquidation by money managers over the past two weeks across the four main Brent and WTI
contracts. According to the analysts, closing of longs has outnumbered new shorts by roughly five-to-one with money-manager shorts increasing by 27.4 mb over the past two weeks. The commodity experts have noted that the only time there was more long liquidation over two weeks was in February 2020 at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and the OPEC+ price war. Closing out of long bets has only exceeded 130 mb over two weeks four times, two of which have been in the past three months.
Upward Revisions
According to StanChart, on a purely fundamental basis, there’s scope for Brent prices to rally above $80/bbl given robust demand and a significant Q3 global stock draw. Back in May, Standard Chartered argued that the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) systematically underestimated transport fuel demand and predicted that we were likely to see significant upward revisions. Well, StanChart has been vindicated, with the EIA revising May gasoline demand 344 kb/d higher to 9.396 mb/d, good for a 3.5% Y/Y increase. Jet fuel demand rose 5.9%Y/Y while total oil demand was revised higher by 811 kb/d to 20.8 mb/d, good for a 2.3% increase. Only distillate demand remained weak in the revised data, although the -3.6% Y/Y fall is significantly lower than EIA’s prediction of a -7.1% decline.
StanChart notes that U.S. gasoline demand has been revised higher in 20 of the last 24 months, with an average revision of +146 kb/d, which is 1.6% of demand. The May revision was the second largest during that period, topped only by the 478 kb/d upward revision made to September 2023 demand.
Meanwhile, U.S. oil production growth remains muted. With the reporting season at the tail-end and some large producers yet to report, data from 27 publicly-listed Oil & Gas companies (including the international major oil companies) shows that the combined U.S. oil liquids output in Q2 was 7.347 mb/d, 181 kb/d (2.5%) higher than Q1. However, StanChart notes that this improvement can be largely attributed to a recovery from January’s extreme cold-related production shut-ins, with growth in oil liquids output relative to Q4-2023 coming in at just 15 kb/d (0.2%).
Luckily for the bulls, there might not be much downside to oil prices at this juncture. StanChart’s machine learning tool, SCORPIO, has predicted a Brent price of $76.19 per barrel (bbl) on August 12, less than $1/bbl lower than the current price. StanChart notes that SCORPIO can provide a useful early-warning system, with its forecast of October Brent settlement on 5 August at $76.19 per barrel (bbl) close to the actual settlement at $76.30/bbl. It’s interesting to note that the SCORPIO prediction was made a week before the bearish U.S. economic data came out.
BlackRock has weighed in on the latest global markets rout with a bullish note, saying the U.S. recession fears are overdone. The asset manager has argued that the July U.S. jobs report is more in line with a slowdown than a recession. BlackRock notes that job creation is slowing, but averaged a robust 170,000 over the past three months; consumer spending, while cooling, remains relatively healthy and Q2 corporate earnings have so far topped expectations, with S&P 500 earnings growth projected at about 13%, above the 9% expected at the start of the season. BlackRock is the largest money manager in the world with $9.1 trillion in Assets Under Management (AUM).
By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
