Oil Rises to 1-Year High - How Far Can It Go?

All right, very good morning. It is Tuesday, 2nd of February. We're just coming in really into early North American trading hours, and we've had a meaningful price point printed in front-month WTI crude futures. And so I wanted to get joined again by our senior trader at Amplify, Tim Duggan. Tim, you are I'm very good.

Hope you're doing good yourself.

Yeah, yeah, all good. I'm keen to get into this oil discussion for just 5 or 10 minutes, and I guess to start things off, it's always good to look at where we've come from as to why it's relevant now, both fundamentally and technically.

Sure.

How do you see it?

Yeah, so I'm just going to share a chart with you which is really what I call a story chart, and you've probably heard it from familiar with seeing story charts annotated. So this is WTI crude North American oil. So essentially, you know, we can get into— well, we're not going to get into all the, you know, drama over the years, but really let's focus on the COVID period. And we've essentially from around, let's see, March, we had the spat between Russia Saudi not agreeing, throwing their toys out of the pram, walking away. And then really we had that gap down when they announced, well, they couldn't come to terms with their cuts, cut agreements. Eventually they did come in with the cut agreements and they took us out of what was sub-zero prices. This is back-adjusted now, so you're not— that's why you're not seeing sub-zero on these prices. This is Essentially a weekly chart, um, adjusted for the March '21 contract. But what we're looking at here is effectively weekly bars, um, and we've had sort of a cap on trade which has been the 54 handle for the price of the purpose of this chart. Now I'll switch to another chart which actually shows why we've been capped for the last 3 weeks essentially for '21 so far. But, you know, we were coming out of the depths really when the hold on the cuts that OPEC had introduced— they were going to hold those cuts of, I think it was 9.7 mil, a little longer. And then we had the Pfizer vaccine come out with the announcement in November, 2nd November, and we saw great uplift from there. And by, you know, the thing to remember is China and India were actually back to pre-pandemic demand levels at this point. So for us to suddenly start trading back down anywhere here simply wasn't going to happen. The demand was there.

And that's important being because China is the biggest import of this stuff. And yeah, post-pandemic for sure, their economic data stabilized. Far sooner than here in the Western world.

That's right, driven by their approach to lockdowns and controlling spread. So who was buying oil here? Who was buying oil from May all the way through to June, July in very low prices? Well, it was China because they love a bargain. India, they love a bargain. They said load that stuff onto as many containers as you can and get it out here. And that's what they've been doing. We've seen the queue-up of tankers at Chinese and Indian ports through all of this period. And so now, you know, a lot of the supply glut that we had to cause this downturn from lack of demand has now been soaked up, essentially. And so we're not out of the woods yet, and we're going to do another session in the Discord today where I'll detail out the supply and demand picture. But essentially, these prices are justified. Now, the tech— there are two reasons here really for us to go on up here, and the main one has been, uh, the recovery in demand from Asia, and that is coming back across into the Western world now too. But what also is going on is from a technical perspective, right? If we go on to a simpler sort of a daily bar chart here, um, you'll see that this is daily bars and this is essentially where we broke down on the OPEC SPOT. And you can see that the— this ceiling here around $53.79, which is the low of the 2nd of March, acted as such a fantastic ceiling on price since essentially the 13th of Jan.

All the way through here.

Look at this, all the way through. And this is a bull flag. This is, you know, very Simplex edge that we use. But you can see this breakout occurring. Now I want to get into the facts here, two things. The fact that one, there is no resistance here. There is no resistance from 79s to 56.85s. You know, where, where is the resistance? There is none.

Maybe Maybe at $55, it being such an interesting round number handle for the industry, for oil traders, maybe $55 will take some profits in. But given that we come down 70% faster than we go up, I think over the next 3.5 days, we're going to be at $56.85, which is going to be a much bigger appreciation in value for oil. The other thing, just to explain more detailed timing on why we're now breaking out, is that today we have APIs. Well, this range here in gray in the bottom is, is the, is the API inflection range, which is something I cover with my, with the elite team and some of the members of the general room. And you can see that this was such a pivot for the entire complex, really, for the last week. Well, today we're going to get new API data this evening at 9:30 PM. But you need to remember, hedge funds and sophisticated, um, you know, private equity firms actually have satellite imagery of the storage tanks. So they have the information on what API and DOE is going to come in at already. And look what they're doing—

they're buying.

So I wouldn't surprise me at all to see a little bit of a pullback here at $53.78, and then we can really rip up here. So really just wanted to mark the cards— everyone's card on that— as we are going to see higher oil prices over the next 3 days. And at the same time, there seems to be a little bit of rebouncing in the dollar going on here. So I don't know, what are your thoughts on the dollar on this, Anthony?

Yeah, the dollar move up has been perhaps a little bit more aggressive the last 24 hours than I would have thought. But, you know, looking at the broader asset class mix at the moment, obviously last week we had this momentary kind of almost apprehension a little bit midweek when the equity space was trading a little heavy. And people were getting a bit sidetracked about this, these concentrated, um, short position, the equities, on the whole kind of Reddit trader movement. But that's exactly what it was. I think it's a distraction for the broader market direction. And yeah, the global equities today, after we hit that low at the reopening of trade, I mean, we've just gone up and up and up yesterday. Today we're up, indicating a higher open as well. We've got this point, I can't see a lot really to push this equity market down. And I think oil and equities are moving on the same narrative, which has helped particularly with WTI on the breach of some key longer technical points on a multi-month and even multi-year timeframe. Because at the moment, when you think about the Conversations on Capitol Hill with stimulus, you know, they're not going to cut— you shouldn't have expectations they're going to cut a deal immediately. That's not the point. The fact that they're talking is a meaningful movement on from the types of dealing that we were seeing in Congress in the previous administration. And then you've got things like the vaccine and so on. It's still obviously we're far from out of the woods yet, but things are progressing. And so at the moment, you know, I do feel still directionally for now quite bullish equities to move back to all-time highs. And in step with that then, I kind of see that being a uniform move on a bigger, broader macro play where oil, supported by these lower supportive technical points now, should then underpin this gradual move to the upside. Um, so yeah, with dollar movement, I'm not really reading too much into that, trying to pin or curate news to it.

Um, there is one element to the dollar that is interesting, and that I was reading, uh, I think it was last night, that the dollar is actually one of the most shorted instruments at the moment, right?

Or investment community, which, which makes sense because if you think about that multi-month period we had leading up to the kind of Georgia Senate switch when we had— that's kind of initiated a little bit of or positive dollar short-term movement. The dollar has been trending, the DXY has been going down for a long time. And the general broader market view is still that the dollar does weaken. So yeah, I can understand the market being quite heavy short in that trade. So hence, this is one thing we were seeing in that downward trend in the DXY at the time over a several-month period was it would go down and you'd almost see the squeeze. Then it would come back down again. And it had that quite uniform little pops, very short-lived, could even be half a day. And then buyers come in or sellers come back in and it trends down again. So I still don't think we're that far removed from that being a situation at the moment. I don't think there's much here to make me think that, yeah, medium term, we're going to persistently see dollar strength. I can't really see that right now.

Do you think that we could though, if this coming out of COVID coming out of lockdowns, into the spring, into the summer, do you think that risk premium that's been kind of put into, say, dollar weak— well, sorry, what's been driving the dollar down— is now kind of off the table essentially over the next quarter?

I think that theoretically that makes sense. I think in practicality, the loosening of that is very protracted. It's very long. It's going to take much longer, I think, than most people expect. And then the ultimate response in policy decision-making is going to be from a monetary policy side, ultimately very slow anyway, and it's going to remain ultra-accommodative. So yeah, I don't— that could play out, as you say, but I don't really see it too much at the moment. So I'm going to— I'll leave that recording forwarding there. And I must just stress, as much as we're feeling fairly bullish, optimistic here on price, um, please just take it as for our view only. We're not saying to go out and then start loading up in oil. That's just how we see it from both our fundamental and technical analysis at this point in time. So yeah, have a good rest of the day.

Thanks everyone.