It’s A Soft Start To The Week For Refined Products On This Quasi-Holiday, After A Strong Finish To June

It’s a soft start to the week for refined products on this quasi-holiday, after a strong finish to June. While refined products are seeing small losses in the early going, oil prices are seeing decent gains of around 70 cents/barrel. 

The Nymex will have a normal trading schedule today before trading in an abbreviated session tomorrow with no settlements posting. OPIS is following the NYMEX lead and will be publishing spot prices, while Platts and Argus are not assessing markets either day, which will keep trading activity at a minimum until Wednesday. 

If at first you don’t succeed: Saudi Arabia and Russia announced they would be extending their voluntary production cuts in August to try and boost prices at the OPEC & Friends meeting today. Earlier moves to prop up prices have had limited impact and makes this latest effort to coordinate look somewhat weak.

Money managers were acting very bearish on oil prices in the latest CFTC COT report, with large increases in new short positions and reductions in length. Of course, oil prices have rallied 4 straight days after this data was compiled so the large speculators may want a do-over on those positions. The activity was mixed for refined products with RBOB seeing a reduction in speculative length, while ULSD saw a large increase.

Baker Hughes reported more declines in drilling activity last week with crude oil rigs declining by 1, while natural gas rigs dropped by 6 on the week, marking a fresh 16 month low. 

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