When considering such as bearish chart as for crude oil, it’s interesting to play a mind game and consider it as perhaps a stock chart – an Enron or a Worldcom, and the prospect of oil going to zero.
Brazil’s cash-strapped mining giant Vale has sold four mega freighters to a Chinese consortium for US$423 million, local media reported Wednesday.
These are interesting times for oil traders and speculators with Friday’s OPEC meeting in Vienna now on the horizon, and the question that will then be answered is whether the group will cut output to stem the supply glut that is now increasingly having to be held offshore around the oceans of the world.
Regardless of what asset you are using to build a portfolio or trade having a clear idea of its risks and rewards are very important. However, understanding yourself is even more paramount.
Copper, along with several of the other principal base metals fell sharply this week as a resurgent US dollar drove many commodities lower, with both gold and silver also selling off strongly. For the base metals market it was Nickel which saw the most dramatic price moves, falling over 5.5% with copper and zinc both falling over 2 %, with tin one of the few commodities closing higher.
Dramatic monetary policies in Europe have lots of potential to create a new surge of hot money inflow into China, says Simon Derrick, chief currency strategist at the Bank of New York Mellon.
EURUSD is moving inside a rising channel on its 1-hour forex chart, with price just finding resistance at the top of the range. Stochastic is moving lower, indicating that sellers are in control of price action for now. MACD is also heading down, which confirms the bearish momentum.
For oil traders and speculators hitting the sell button has become almost automatic, as the heavily bearish tone for the commodity shows no signs of abating just yet, with another solid move lower yesterday offering low risk trading opportunities once again.
With another trading week over, and Non Farm Payroll having come and gone for another month, markets in general are now looking forward, as the minor reversal in the US dollar’s unstoppable progress appears to have simply been a temporary pause and reaction to the worse than expected employment data.
For longer term oil traders it’s been a question of being patient and waiting, as the commodity continued to consolidate in a narrow trading range, following the extended move lower of early October, which saw the price of oil break through the floor of potential resistance in the $88 per barrel region, before moving down to consolidate in the $79 to $83 per barrel region, where it has remained since.
