Valeant takes another dive, Crude oil holds $50

VRX – I’ll leave that one for The Fly.

WTI Crude Oil trades at 50.10, early this morning, with Brent pushing 51. Now we will await the is week’s API scam numbers to show us the way forward.

You will excuse me for the scam comment, Dear Reader, as the API numbers have been wildly diverging from the “Official” EIA numbers due Wednesday, even though they both use the same data.

I will instead lean on my Powers of Observation to predict the short-term trend based on the time I sat in NY Metro-area traffic so hideous that it alone should have affected the amount of gasoline in storage on the East Coast. Rebels blowing up the entire infrastructure of the Nigerian oil industry does not hurt the trend, either.

It is time for WTI to hover above 50, at least for a little while. The markets are swarming with speculators eager to ride the next wave of this bullshit bull move up – on mildly bearish comments from Grandma Yellin. The Dow Jones “Industrial” Average has a symbiotic relationship with the price of crude lately and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

I tend to do my oil trading in equities rather than futures, so I have been quietly accumulating MRO for the couple of weeks. Exodus has just flagged MRO as overbought, so I tread lightly and have put in a stop loss which has been steadily adjusted upwards. However, MRO is up another 3% in premarket this morning.

The recent numbers coming from the automobile industry lend support to my recent bullish stance on oil as Idiot Americans who until recently were buying every fucking Prius they could get their hands on are now buying every F-150 that Ford can produce. Car sales are down and light truck/SUV sales are soaring.