Thursday, June 23, 2011

Goldman Sachs on Oil: "Whatever" (GS)

Hey, when you can't beat Vitol beat your clients.*
From ZeroHedge:
Uber-Flip flopper extraordinaire Goldman Sachs just cut its Brent target  price a month after hiking its price target to $130, a month after cutting it to $105 (and just as we predicted two hours before the Goldman announcement).

The latest number from David Greely: $105-$107/bbl. To wit: "The International Energy Agency announced today that its member countries have agreed to release 60 million barrels of oil from their emergency stocks over a period of 30 days. The IEA has coordinated this release, only the third in its history, in response to the ongoing loss of Libyan light sweet crude oil production and the impact that the resulting higher crude oil prices are having on the world economy. We estimate that a 60 million barrel release by the end of July has the potential to reduce our 3-month Brent crude oil price target by $10-12/bbl, to $105-107/bbl. 125/bbl." Full bizarro day report below, although all that matters is that Goldman is buying Brent again, after the "GS vs Client" scorecard now reads 3:0...MORE
*Vitol is an oil trader.
 $150 Bil. in revenues.

Here's an example of Goldman v. Client, ca. 2008:
It’s official, Goldman capitulates on oil
Oil is below $49/Bbl, $48.70 down $4.00 last I saw.
From FT Alphaville:
Goldman’s latest commodities note is out, and this is all you need to know:

Closing our oil trading recommendations
Although we have emphasized in the past few weeks that continued weak oil demand exacerbated by constrained credit conditions will contribute to soften near-term fundamentals keeping WTI prices, timespreads and gasoline cracks under pressure, we have left our oil trading recommendations open, expecting that high volatility would provide a better exit point to our trades. The volatility in the past few weeks has mostly been to the downside and the pressure on the oil complex has increased. In the near term, we do not expect significant upside potential and as a consequence we are closing all of our oil trading recommendations.
Translation: We were wrong and we’re sorry. Ouch.

From Barron's:

Goldman Backs Off Its Oil ‘Super Spike’ Theory


TURNS OUT, $200 CRUDE WAS TOO AGGRESSIVE A CALL....