Oil price will end the week up

Apologies for the stop-start nature of the blog this week, so many results meetings and presentations that also make catching up with writing up company visits, being delayed, will get easier after this, a bit.

The oil price will end the week up a couple of dollars barring disasters and the jobs data shouldn’t cause grief at around 195/- nor will the rig count. The latter may fall through 500 overall and 400 in oil, both Jay Cheatham and Dennis Proctor reckon that those numbers will be down to lows not seen for 45 years.

The story in oil is the same, horrible fundamentals shown by a really awful set of inventory stats of +10m and loaded up pretty much everywhere especially at Cushing. This must get worse as March and with an early Easter refineries will be planning their Spring maintenance programmes.

On the positive side the Nigerian minister has taken over from the Venezuelan in terms of rhetoric and has announced that the Opec/Non-Opec meeting will take place on March 20th in Russia. I’m not quite sure whether they were listening at the CERA conference but in words of very much one syllable Naimi made it plain that cuts were just not coming…Some bulls are still hanging on to the straw that is current supply disruption, fair enough and it may total as much as 1m b/d but is only temporary. Finally the forecasts of some really bad weather in the North East of the States so far hasn’t prompted any real pick up in product or NG prices.