Crude

As expected yesterday, when the US went out full bore with a Japan-lite approach of McCollum-like strategy of leaving Iran no option but to keep escalating until finally the US has enough public support grounds for a response, in under 24 hours Iran has launched a second missile, this time not a medium-range SAM to a long-range shore-to-sea missile. Needless to say, the US 5th Navy is watching these quite welcome developments with great interest. From Reuters: "Iran said on Monday it had successfully test fired a long-range missile during its naval exercise in the Gulf, flexing its military muscle to show it could hit Israel and U.S. bases in the region if attacked. The announcement came amid rising tension over Iran's disputed nuclear programme which Western powers believe is working on developing atomic bombs. Tehran denies the accusation and last week said it would stop the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz if the West carried out threats to impose sanctions on its oil exports." At this point it is glaringly obvious to all but the most confused that the US is consistently pushing Iran to escalate further and further, until such time as the US ships stationed in Bahrain say enough and decide it is time to sink some boats.

Traders in the market (what little is left of them) always seek out the investment thesis with the highest upside/downside ratio to a delta in any fundamental forecast. In other words, what derivative play to a secular trend generates the higher IRR? A good example is the ABX which allowed contrarians in 2006 and early 2007 to bet on a collapse in subprime and put on a "short" at next to now cost of carry, with practically no downside if the thesis ended up being wrong, and unlimited upside (just ask Paolo Pellegrini and Kyle Bass). Well, as we just learned, one of UBS "surprises" for 2012 is that oil could drop below $70/barrell. Is this possible? Absolutely - should the Eurozone collapse, and/or China experience the long-overdue hard landing, a deflationary shock (which will naturally only precipitate the central banks into an even more rapid devaluation of legacy paper currencies) can and likely will send crude tumbling (Iran geopolitical concerns aside) as happened back in early 2009 when crude collapsed to around $30/barrel however briefly. So is there a better option to play crude downside than merely shorting CL? Perhaps one idea with better "upside" in case of a deflationary collapse in crude is to get bearish on Boeing instead. As the following chart from Goldman shows, 3 of the 4 biggest widebody (and thus most profitable) aircraft orders are from Gulf airline companies - Emirates, Qatar and Etihad. Together, they amount to about 450 profitable future orders... which could well be cancelled if Gulf states revert to their panicked state last seen so vividly in the spring of 2009 when they were cancelling orders left and right. 

While one of the bigger commodity funds out there, in this case Fortress Commodities Fund, has not done too hot recently (down 7.4% in October), which it humbly admits to and says, "the month of October was a wakeup call for us and we are adjusting accordingly" here are some must read perspectives that lead the Fortress Commodity group to conclude that "We're Long Gold, Short Base Metals, Patient Crude Strength Seller & Buyer Of Corn On Any Real Flush In Prices." Oh, and that it's "macroeconomic outlook remains pessimistic."

It appears that China has already forgotten its close encounter with inflation as recent as a few months ago leading to assorted riots, and is instead far more concerned with the collapsing housing market. As a result it just announced a 50 bps reserve ratio cut, well in advance of when most commentators thought it would happen, on what is now the start of a monetary policy loosening cycle. The kneejerk reaction is for futures to surge and gold to spike, and crude to pass $100, even as the EURUSD was once again drifting lower overnight. And while this is beyond bullish for commodities, we doubt equities will remain bid unless Europe mysteriously fixes itself overnight too. Which won't happen. More from Reuters: "China's central bank cut the reserve requirement ratio for its banks on Wednesday for the first time in nearly three years to ease credit strains and shore up activity in the world's second-largest economy." Naturally, this ties Bernanke's hand even more as Chinese inflation will now be stoked internally in addition to importing any excess inflation to be generated by the Chairman, likely leading to an even faster spike in global inflation the next time we get US-based quantiative easing. Look for Chinese-based purchases of gold to surge.

JPM, which has been stuck holding on to reflationary assets for months and months expecting a QE3 announcement which keeps on not coming as the market always frontruns it and makes any actual reflationary progress by the Fed impossible, couldn't wait to release today's crude price update following the reversal of the Seaway pipeline. The bottom line: JPM is lifting its WTI forecast to $110/bbl in 2012 and $118/bbl in 2013, and see the Brent-WTI spread narrowing to $5 and $3/bbl in those years, respectively. Previously WTI was seen as hitting $97.4 in 2011 and $114.25 in 2013. Consumers everywhere rejoice as they will have to take even more debt on (never to be repaid of course) in addition to never paying their mortgage payments. As noted earlier, now that WTI is well north of $102, kiss any deflation risks goodbye and with that the announcement of MBS LSAPs. At least until tomorrow's post 3 am European gap down, which will be fully filled and then some in the period between noon and 4pm.

Remember that October "deflation" that was driven by energy prices dropping (as reported 5 mintues ago)? You can forget it. As of seconds ago, WTI just passed $100 for the first time since July 26. This is another $200 billion in GDP that was just taken out. The market forecast now is global meltdowny with chance of QE3: 85/95%. And in fundamental news, Enbridge and Enterprise announced they would reverse the direction of crude oil flow from Cushing to the US Gulf. Hardly bearish for WTI prices and will likely lead to an even faster compression between Brent and WTI.

The last month has been a violent one for stock and bond investors but a look at the forward curve for Crude Oil also tells a story of hugely volatile moves. Oil has shifted from contango to backwardation in the last month but it is today's dramatically disconnected move that has many scratching their heads. As we approached the European close today, oil started to rally and rally fast. Initial rumors of ECB printing were quickly dismissed as gold and silver slid back but crude kept going - all on its own. After being perfectly in sync with BTPs for the last few days, we wonder if traders were short oil as their hedge against European long risk exposures and the LCH margin call forced liquidations and unwinds - idiosyncratically cracking the oil market back over $97.50.

Commodity prices have certainly been volatile in the last few days with near-record-breaking upside shifts in some. Copper's extravaganza in the last two days was discussed earlier but it is the huge shift in the whole WTI crude complex that is perhaps more fascinating. For the first time since May 2011, Dec 11 WTI is more expensive than Dec 12 and in the last three trading days alone, the entire curve has shifted to backwardation very aggressively. This inflation-prone signal, and much chatter among Fed talking heads on 'helping' the Europeans, could perhaps help explain the strange 'strength' in the EUR as it and the USD circle the drain of fiat currencies. Gold has obviously yet to get going, but today has broken $1660 (up over $50 in the last few days).

A mystery to me. My conclusion is that more government intervention in the oil market about to happen.

So much for the IEA's intervention. Crude is once again comfortably over $100, and by the looks of things will be heading far higher before long. Yet the climb back to triple digits was not easy. Note the numerous plunges in CL where crude prices would tumble for no other reason than having way too many trigger-fingered headline scanning algos trading each and every commodity, and massively overreacting to the smallest piece of good or bad news. Elsewhere, we expect rumblings about gas at the pump, which is now set to resume its climb to $4.00/gallon to once again return, as economic models have to be adjusted even lower as that great whooshing sound is America's marginal discretionary purchasing capacity entering millions of gas tanks side by side with the unleaded.

Courtesy of the IEA which earlier loudly announced 'No More SPR Releases' (although like the ECB earlier announced it would not accept defaulted Greek debt as collateral only to reneg, this is total bullshit), and another massive taxpayer funded iteration of EFSF monetization-infused moral hazard, crude is back to $100. Since the EFSF will very soon be expanded to over $1 trillion and since this is nothing less than Europe's version of QE, and paradrops money that just like the Fed's own daily POMOs will ultimately find its way into the market, as holders of toxic Greek debt shift their assets into risk holdings, we expect crude to surge to $110, then $120, then $130 and so forth until another global depression has to be called in. And, naturally, the same with every other hard asset that can not be diluted.

After we reported about the aberrant Crude Oil Futures algo earlier, we asked out friends at Nanex to take a closer look. What they discovered is something far more disturbing than merely another iteration of the confused "fractal" algo seen previously trading Natural Gas.

A month ago we presented the strange case of the fractal algo gone amok while trading natural gas in a low volume after hours session. We expected that we would see this surreal trading pattern in other commodities shortly, although little did we know that it would impact the most important of them all, as soon as month later, and during peak trading hours. As the chart of CL EQ1 below shows, not even crude is safe any more from this aberrant trading algorithm which has now infected, it is safe to say, virtually every product. If NYSE Boerse's Duncan Niederauer is really confused about what is causing retail investors to depart in droves out of pure disgust with what are terminally manipulated markets (and not just stocks), we hope this chart provide at least a few clues.

At this point we refuse to even recall whether Goldman is long or short oil. Probably so does Goldman, whose Brent recos have become the same laughing stock as Tom Stolper's EURUSD "strategic" price targets in 2010. Yet Jeffrey Currie has found a new way of dealing with appearing idiosyncratically idiotic. Instead of focusing on any one product, the firm has just upgraded (or rather, maintained its buy) the entire commodity space wholesale: "Progress in dealing with the Greek budget crisis and better economic data have improved sentiment around cyclical assets in recent days. We continue to expect further increases in commodity returns later this year and into 2012. We maintain our overweight recommendation for commodities on a 3-, 6- and 12-month horizon and our 20% 12-month commodity returns forecast." Um, yeah, this comes less than two weeks since the last flip flopping on the matter: "The International Energy Agency announced today that its member countries have agreed to release 60 million barrels of oil from their emergency stocks over a period of 30 days. The IEA has coordinated this release, only the third in its history, in response to the ongoing loss of Libyan light sweet crude oil production and the impact that the resulting higher crude oil prices are having on the world economy. We estimate that a 60 million barrel release by the end of July has the potential to reduce our 3-month Brent crude oil price target by $10-12/bbl, to $105-107/bbl. 125/bbl." Way to preserve street cred there Jeffrey. Of course, the aforementioned flipflopping does not prevent Goldman from mocking the IEA's ridiculous SPR release decision, as well as reiterating its upside expectation in the metals space, with an emphasis on gold, copper and zinc. As a reminder, if Jeffrey says "buy", run, Forest, run.

As was previously disclosed, as part of the SPR's auctioning off of 30 million barrels of light sweet crude, bids for a total of 30.64 million barrels of oil at an average bid of $107.20/barrell were submitted by various parties. The only thing unknown was the identity of the parties, which however has now been all cleared up following the release of the complete bid list from the DOE. Probably the most notable (if not completely expected) discovery is that JPM, that FDIC-insured depositor bank, has requested 1.5 million barrels at a price of $105.33 for a total of $158 million. We wonder just what JPM plans on doing with this crude, which as predicted, will be transported by vessel, and offloaded at such time as JPM sees fit, probably well after the product is trading at a substantial premium to the purchase price. Other potential buyers include Valero, Vitol, Shell, Conoco, Plains and various other E&P companies. Ironically, JPM wants more crude than Sunoco and Tesoro: so next time one tries to gas up their car, we suggest looking for the JP Morgan gas station. But by far the most important news is that 80% of the bid are based on a vessel-based distribution, meaning it will be weeks if not months before the SPR disposed crude finally makes it into circulation, if at all, and has an actual supply-side benefit. Complete bid list is attached.