by Kirk Spano
Market Watch
Since the December OPEC meeting, I have come to one inescapable conclusion: that OPEC will never cut production again at the expense of its own market share. Based on that idea, in the past couple of months, my clients, subscribers and I have done well to trade around oil’s further decline, the slow bleed out of indebted oil stocks and even bet against a few banks. In the past week, however, oil has shown some strength on the back of young traders and short covering. With huge resistance around $37 per barrel of oil, I don’t see that strength lasting long.
Back in late 2011 I identified — at about the same time that several institutions did — that the U.S. shale industry was going to change the global energy dynamic and recommended buying oil stocks. By 2014, I recognized that the price of oil would collapse, suggested selling oil stocks and invested in the dollar. In 2015, I made the same mistake that T. Boone Pickens admitted to recently, in that I, too, believed the rebalancing of the oil market would happen much faster than it has. The result was that I gave back a lot of 2014’s gains.