I wouldn't abaondon the notion of a shortage in crude oil products just yet. Feb crude closed at $25.52 down 6 cents. It made an intraday low of 424.73. The distillates reversed their losses as well and unleaded gas actually closed up 1.3 pennies.

Watch the price of the oil products and not the months of the talking-head yuppies.

-- Ishkabibble (ishman@home.com), January 04, 2000

Answers

Sorry for the spelling errors - I had too much of my stockpiled coffee today.

The Feb crude made an intraday low of $24.73.

-- Ishkabibble (ishman@home.com), January 04, 2000.

It was one heck of a reversal rebound and it did seem like some big money knew something that the general public didn't.

-- Downstreamer (downstream@bigfoot.com), January 04, 2000.

a beauty to behold

-- (acgfloor@aol.com), January 04, 2000.

can someone explain a reversal? thanks

-- stoney (stoney@yahoo.com), January 04, 2000.

See my question above concerning the price action of near/far term contracts.

A reversal occurs when -- in a day -- a markets starts strongly in one direction and then reverses to move the opposite direction. This morning the oil market dropped strongly, as noted above, then this afternoon prices began going up as players began buying.

My comment in the post above is that the contract for each succeeding month rose by a greater amount. Normally the nearest contract (February) is the one must subject to change, and the amount by which each contract rises or falls should decrease as the contract moves further out. This didn't happen.

Question: Does this indicate that whoever was buying knows that we will have oil delivery problems?

-- rocky (rknolls@no.spam), January 04, 2000.

Rocky,

We know there will be 400,000 barrels per day less oil coming from Nigeria for the duration of January, due to a pipeline closure:

http://www.crbindex.com/news/story1905.html

"In Nigeria...Shell again declared force majeure on Forcados loadings through January. The Forcados terminal handles 400,000 barrels per day of crude oil."

For details of the closure:

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002Csx

-- Bruce (Nigeria is@major.supplier), January 04, 2000.