The growth of oil is subjective: sales are actual

At the start of the week, oil showed a very impressive rally. A natural reaction to such a significant growth is an attempt to understand its reasons. If we talk about supply and demand, then no major changes have been observed. So what is happening isn’t so much related to the objective reaction as to the subjective moods in the market.

The point is that as the tension in the trade war between the United States and China decreases, the markets calm down somewhat and adjust to a positive mood, which pushes the quotes upwards. The mind map is as follows: the transition of the trade war into an active phase with serious damage to both sides means problems for the two largest economies of the world. Which in turn means that the demand for oil will not grow at the pace expected by the markets, and this means that a surplus of oil will again appear in the market, which in turn is a serious reason for lowering oil quotations (according to some experts, the scale of the decline is 30%). If the tension in the trade war subsides and the damage from it is minimal, the demand for oil will be stable, which means that it is the reason for expectations of the growth in oil prices.

Another recent factor in favor of oil growth has been the worsening of the situation in the Middle East. But, the situation there has been exacerbated for quite some time, so this is more of an excuse than a real reason.

Despite the growth of oil in the last few days, we still do not see a serious potential for its continuation. First of all, the current growth has a purely subjective basis in the form of market sentiments and expectations. As for the objective things, there are many reasons for selling: the OPEC + contract is not eternal, American shale producers are simply in great shape and almost every week set new records for production (according to experts, the US will finish 2018 as the world's leader by oil production, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia), also there are purely technical reasons - oil climbed very high and needs correction.

Well, finally, yesterday, data on oil reserves in the US (from the API) were published. Experts expected their decrease by 189K barrels, and instead oil reserves increased by 1.8 million barrels. That again confirms what we said above.

So, our position is - any increase in oil prices to the yearly highs, we recommend to use for asset sales.