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Tag Archives: $SCO

Biding My Time

Waiting for an oil market correction is a lot like watching toddlers playing with toys from the next age category up. The pieces are all there, and they’re having the time of their lives, but they sure as hell have no clue where anything goes.

Italian numbers were just abhorrent this morning. And the long assumed 8% growth rate of China has been humiliated. European recovery and Chinese domination were all cornerstones of the global growth theory. They have since been shattered, but like Wile E. Coyote, the market hasn’t quite worked out that things have changed.

The oil inventory number that got everyone excited last week can be explained away as a one off. Moving inventories around and offloading them to storage facilities. But there’s no doubt that oil demand continues to fall. ISM numbers, manufacturing, foreign economic GDP…it’s all telling the same story. There have been only a handoff of positive reads, and they’re being put on a pedestal, when they should be put under scrutiny.

I’ve seen this plenty of times before now. Oil prices stay elevated, ignoring the bad news, assuming that sooner or later something good will come along to set it all straight again. And the market ignored the news for months.

Then it implodes.

The losses never last long; just a few months. But the moves are fast and gargantuan.

So sit back and enjoy the game for a while. Play it if you want. I’m content to spend nine tenths of the time waiting for that one special moment when all the real money gets made. It’s coming – like gravity.

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Crude Oil Implosion Right On Schedule

The old rules of thumb about the oil markets have been turned on their heads. If it escaped your attention, for the last few years, wisdom that summer carries with it higher prices from more demand have been great…if your goal is to lose money.

Because what has actually been happening is each year, the summer brings with it renewed fears about the sustainability of the recovery, and as the winter optimism from holiday activity slumps, something – maybe speculative buyers in the oil markets, maybe something more complicated than that – slackens and all of a sudden, we get this big rush of inventory that floods our storage centers.

And anyone caught calling plays from their grandfathers old book goes long oil at exactly the worst possible time.

The thing is, for whatever reason, it always seems to get bought towards the end of summer, right when the rule of thumb dictates that oil demand should be falling. Maybe it’s all part of a game. Maybe there’s some reason for it I just don’t understand – I guess having selloffs in the winter months are always more dangerous; what happens if something important, like heating, gets disrupted?

I may not know why this is happening, but I don’t need to be an oil industry expert to know what my eyes are telling me.

SCO is spiking up 5% today, and oil inventories are building quickly. For the moment, everything is just peachy in the markets – actually, in the same day I’m up 5% shorting oil, the rest of my holdings are all largely green.

But it won’t last. We are on the cusp of a nasty selloff that will bring some humanity back to investing and some shame back to the arrogant.

And it will be treated as the end of the world. Or at least until the fall, when buyers likely step back in, claiming “no way that happens ever again…”

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Hunkered Back Down

There wasn’t much need to, but I took profits in the RGR and BAS shares I most recently purchased on the last “selloff”. The RGR shares were bought on 4/4 for $48.03 and the BAS shares were bought on 4/26 for $13.03.

I unloaded them for $50.78 and $13.98, respectively.

I also added to my SCO hedge for $37.30.

Even if I wasn’t expecting the annual recession scare(s), energy demand is clearly falling, and since most of my book is in CCJ and BAS, that leaves me exposed. As I believe this is the start of the next washout, it just makes sense to bunker myself.

Net equivalent cash position now stands north of 50% again, counting on EUO and SCO hedging.

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Shorting Oil Again

I added a position in SCO for $40.19.

This takes my artificial cash position north of 50%. We are at the “edge of disappointment”, where things are neither good nor bad, but merely “meh”.

“Meh” gets you killed.

Europe will flare up again. Cyprus doesn’t matter particularly. The underlying reason we keep hearing about the EU is because the EU is fundamentally fucked on a spindle. The cost of holding the euro together, not just in terms of money, but in terms of man hours, resources, lost opportunities, bitter resentment, livelihood,…is just immense.

It’s never just about the money. When the economics and numbers don’t work, it should usually be a warning sign that you’re screwing something up largely. Money is a metric for measurement; hence why when obnoxious social justiciers whine about people only caring about the money – refusing to just go along with their latest “great idea” – I have a resounding urge to punch them in the throat.

I really don’t understand why European citizens are subjecting themselves to this. It’s not like they’re avoiding the losses…the pain is coming either way, so it’s a choice of accepting that, making changes to improve their underlying format, and moving on, or…not accepting that, getting the beat down anyway and setting themselves up for more failure later.

Anyways…Italian/Spanish/French debt is docile now, but it’s just a matter of time before the next explosion. Europe continues to miss deficit reduction targets by a quarter mile, and they’re all in recessions.

Dangers to the SCO position would include if the ECB and Fed were ever permitted to team up like Batman and Robin; doesn’t seem in the cards at the moment (or ever), but it’s worth stipulating that I really believe Bernanke & Co would view $150 oil as a “successful policy outcome.”

For the meantime, however, I’ve got decreasing industrial production overseas, an oil production bonanza here at home, and a hundred-years demographic movement towards smaller commutes all playing to my hand.

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