Oil commentary - 9 February 2022

Morning all.?Brent is trading this morning at $90.59 down 0.19 and WTi is trading down 0.18 at $89.18.?"While the spoken word can travel faster, you can't take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader" - Kingman Brewster, Jr.?Thanks Brewy.?Fantastic name as well.?He's right though, old Brewy Junior.?The problem is though, how much of what an oil bull reads ACTUALLY gets absorbed? Yesterday being a case in point.?This headline came out "Ukraine crisis: Macron says Putin pledges no new Ukraine escalation".?Nice.?Now, whilst this isn't a signed, sealed and delivered stand down it is certainly encouraging for all those who were concerned that tensions at the Ukrainian border may result in a fall of Russian oil and gas exports.?This was a fair summary of the situation and the market, justifiably concerned, priced in I would say around $10 dollars per barrel of risk premium.?So, one would expect that an easing of tensions spoken from the words of a G7 leader would result in some of that risk premium coming off??No.?Well, it did, a bit, the oil market in general yesterday was risk off but by 10 bucks??Not a chance.?In fact, let's look back at some recent issues that the market has priced in as a reason for markets to push higher, shall we??Early January we had unrest in Kazakhstan, this resulted in zero crude output losses, but the market took your $77.04 low and quickly traded up to $81.50.?Nice.?Then we had Libya outages, something that has been going on in Libya for the best part of a decade now, I'll take your $81.50 and give you back $83.98.?The we entered a phase where nothing really happened, so the market took that as an issue, too and it swiped $83.98 out of your hand and within a week was at $88.66.?Then we had an "explosion" on a crude pipeline between Kirkuk and Ceyhan.?$88.66 was very quickly replaced by $91.48.?Then tensions started to rise on the Ukrainian border and Brent has manged to use this as leverage to sustain above $90.?Now, I ask you this - with President Macron stating that the situation between Russia and Ukraine easing, which of those issues is still ongoing??Libya production back.?Kazakhstan was never an issue.?The pipeline issue was sorted out straight away and it seems like diplomacy will win regarding Russia/Ukraine. Not only are those issues sorted (mostly) but we have also seen inflationary pressure globally meaning a turnaround in monetary policy, demand faltering owing to Omicron and a 34 million barrel build so far this year on US gasoline stocks.?I say all this, but oil is going to $100.?Just because it is, ok??Stats later.?Ignore those.?Good day.