Here's the last year of WTI prices via FinViz:
Currently $49.32, down another 30 cents.
From Platts' The Barrel blog:
This is the second of a three-part look at why oil prices have failed to rally despite OPEC’s best efforts at managing supply cuts. Read part 1 here.
So, why is everyone so bullish?
Many oil analysts take as a fait accompli that OPEC-led production cuts thus far are key to balancing the crude market. If this is the case, though, why hasn’t it happened yet?
But the bulls say give it time. In the long run, the market will balance.
Everyone knows what Keynes said about the long run (that we are all dead).
That the market is prime for a rally has become gospel truth. But isn’t something so paradigmatic just a little bit risky?
“Oil prices will get better, and you can take that to the bank,” David Purcell, head of macro research at Tudor, Pickering and Holt, said at a recent Dallas conference.
“The market is under-supplied, inventories are back to normal levels by the end of the year, and if you guys don’t drill the Permian too fast, we’re okay,” Purcell said.
But drilling too fast is just what drillers have been doing. According to Platts Analytics RigData, active Permian horizontal rigs now stand at 280, 40% of all US horizontal drilling. The number of US horizontal rigs will likely break above 700 soon, revisiting a number last seen in April 2015, when Permian rigs made up just 25% of the total.
Calling for $60/b by the year’s end, FGE Chairman Fereidun Fesharaki said at a Fujairah bunkering conference last month that recent price pessimism was overdone and that financial players in the short term were misreading the market.
Many of the banks have been driving this home as well.
While Credit Suisse analysts earlier this month conceded that both Atlantic Basin and Asia-Pacific crude markets are suffering from oversupply — widening price discounts for Asian grades like Russia’s ESPO Blend and Qatar’s Al-Shaheen can attest to that — they also say that it is too early to ditch the idea that just because prices have struggled, the market isn’t rebalancing....MUCH MORE
