By FXEmpire.com

Introduction: Crude Oil is considered the king of the commodities markets.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is the United States’ emergency oil stockpile, and it is the largest emergency petroleum supply in the world. The reserve stores about 570 million barrels of crude oil in underground salt caverns at four sites along the Gulf of Mexico. Any dipping into this reserve is going to be big news.

Brent Crude is traded in London as something called Futures contracts, which are priced in US Dollars. Now, all you traders brave enough to run your positions over a period of days or weeks, pay attention

Most commonly traded is the NYMEX where you find West Texas Crude. It is also traded in USD.

Weekly Analysis and Recommendation:

Crude Oil jumped on Friday to trade at 85.02 and close the week strong, but still down for the month.

With recent data and meetings crude has been depressed and still continues to trade at a low number. OPEC meet earlier to address over production and the OPEC ministers agreed to hold to quotas, but the US production has increased by huge volumes adding to the global oversupply.

With recent drops in growth forecasts and actual demand, inventories have swelled well above historic levels with the EIA reports very high stocks.

Date

Last

Open

High

Low

Change %

Jun 29, 2012

85.02

78.39

85.30

78.32

8.45%

Jun 28, 2012

78.39

80.42

80.84

77.30

-2.51%

Jun 27, 2012

80.41

79.39

80.84

78.69

1.23%

Jun 26, 2012

79.43

79.28

79.67

78.40

0.16%

Jun 25, 2012

79.30

80.05

80.36

78.05

-0.93%

At a predawn press conference on Friday, the EU Ministers announced the completion of a new plan to support the EU economies with a bank supervising agent with the ability to use funds from the Emergency Funds and the necessary credentials to act to protect and provide liquidity and to keep government borrowing rates down. The new agreements were met by pleasant surprise by the markets as risk became the tone of the day. The US dollar weakened allowing investors to quickly purchase crude oil at a depressed price. The new plan may also push inflation levels, which would be good for crude and it may stimulate growth which would also benefit crude oil as well as most of the commodities.

FxEmpire provides in-depth analysis for each currency and commodity we review. Fundamental analysis is provided in three components. We provide a detailed monthly analysis and forecast at the beginning of each month. Then we provide more recent analysis and information in our weekly reports and we provide daily updates and outlooks.

Major Economic Events for the week of June 25 – 29 actual v. forecast for the US Dollar

Date

Currency

Event

Actual

Forecast

Previous

Jun 25

USD

New Home Sales

369K

347K

343K

Jun 26

USD

S&P/CS Composite-20 HPI y/y

-1.9%

-2.4%

-2.6%

USD

CB Consumer Confidence

62.0

63.8

64.4

Jun 27

USD

Core Durable Goods Orders m/m

0.4%

0.9%

-0.6%

USD

Durable Goods Orders m/m

1.1%

0.5%

-0.2%

USD

Pending Home Sales m/m

5.9%

1.2%

-5.5%

USD

Crude Oil Inventories

-0.1M

-0.5M

2.9M

Jun 28

USD

Unemployment Claims

386K

385K

392K

USD

Final GDP q/q

1.9%

1.9%

1.9%

Jun 29

USD

Core PCE Price Index m/m

0.1%

0.2%

0.1%

USD

Personal Spending m/m

0.0%

0.1%

0.1%

USD

Chicago PMI

52.9

52.8

52.7

USD

Revised UoM Consumer Sentiment

73.2

74.2

74.1

Historical:

Highest: 114.81 on May 02, 2011

Average: 88.78 over this period

Lowest 67.17 on May 25, 2010

WEEKLY

  • This Week in Petroleum
    Release Schedule: Wednesday @ 1:00 p.m. EST (schedule)
  • Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update
    Release Schedule: Monday between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. EST (schedule)
  • Weekly Petroleum Status Report
    Release Schedule: The wpsrsummary.pdf, overview.pdf, and Tables 1-14 in CSV and XLS formats, are released to the Web site after 10:30 a.m. (Eastern Time) on Wednesday. All other PDF and HTML files are released to the Web site after 1:00 p.m. (Eastern Time) on Wednesday. Appendix D is produced during the winter heating season, which extends from October through March of each year. For some weeks which include holidays, releases are delayed by one day. (schedule)

Click here to read Crude Oil Technical Analysis.

Originally posted here