Thursday, November 3, 2016

Oil: Looking Ahead To Next Week's EIA Inventory Report

My response to yesterday's EIA crude in storage report was a measured and professional "Holy crap!"
I didn't know it was the largest build ever but did know it was big huge enormous. Here's the rest of the story.
From OilPrice:
Yesterday’s weekly EIA inventory report showed a 14.4 million-barrel build to oil inventories, the largest since weekly records began in 1982.

Here at ClipperData, we use U.S. Customs bills to report oil imports in a timely fashion. Imports play a key role in the weekly inventory data, making a major contribution to supply, and unsurprisingly, have a big influence on inventory numbers.

Comparing our numbers to those reported by the EIA shows their import data lagging behind the totals reported for the weeks ending October 14 and October 21, and then playing catch-up in the last week, the one ending October 28.

ADVERTISEMENT
x
In the two weeks prior, the EIA reported import numbers into the U.S. Gulf coast that were significantly below the Customs totals. For the week ending October 14, EIA imports into PADD 3 were 550,000 barrels per day below the Customs number, and 116,000 bpd below for the week ending October 21.

For the week ending October 28, there was a massive correction in the data, and the EIA reported imports that were 522,000 bpd higher than Customs data.
http://oilprice.com/images/tinymce/Clip0311B.jpg
Not only do we believe that the EIA missed import volume in the weeks ending October 14 and October 21, but the massive stock build in the week ending October 28 suggests that there was some pent-up stock building that was not reported for at least one week if not two, and that led to the high October 28 number....MORE
WTI is down another 81 cents at $44.53. Here's the last couple week's action from FinViz: