Wow, we covered a lot of stuff in Member Chat this weekend.
After a really fun Friday where we had another couple of massive index puts pay off in the morning and on Saturday we reviewed our October’s Overbought 8 list, with half our trade ideas already past our 50% targets and 3 of the 4 remaining spreads on track. In Member Chat, we discussed the possibility of a pullback in oil next week as the barrel count on the NYMEX is dangerously high with over 600M barrels currently scheduled to deliver to Cushing in the next 90 days. Cushing has a capacity of about 40M barrels a month and they are full but, even if they weren’t, 480M barrels need to be dumped and rolled into Feb, March and April contracts between now and the year’s end.
The November contracts settle on Wednesday, the 20th and any traders caught holding those “hot potato” contracts have to figure out what they will actually do with millions of barrels of oil. Right now, there are 141M barrels earmarked for November delivery and, if this month is typical, only about 20M are actually needed. 141,000 contracts (1,000 barrels each) were traded 210,000 times on Friday as prices fell from $84.12 at 3am (Asia trading) to $80.75 into the NYMEX close. It is easier for a NYMEX trader to drink a barrel of oil than fob off his contracts to some other sucker during a glut – or something like that is the old biblical saying…
What I love about investors and the MSM in this country is their ability to completely ignore the fact that, ultimately, someone must consume the oil that is leading the inflationary drive in the economy. Actually, we shouldn’t blame oil (I said as much last week) but, as I also said last week, QE is the wrong kind of inflation because we are not giving any money to the workers. Ultimately, it’s the workers who have to buy food and fuel you know….
One thing people don’t realize from a global perspective is that gasoline prices are subsidized for India and China to the tune of nearly $40 per barrel so China’s 11Mbd of fuel subsidies is bleeding Beijing by $13Bn a month and that goes up $3Bn a month for every $10 increase in the price of oil over $80. India uses less than 1/3 the amount of…
