Goldman’s Global Oil Scam Passes the 50 Madoff Mark!
by Phil - November 11th, 2009 6:18 am
$2.5 Trillion - That’s the size of of the global oil scam.
It’s a number so large that, to put it in perspective, we will now begin measuring the damage done to the global economy in "Madoff Units" ($50Bn rip-offs). That’s right - $2.5Tn is 50 TIMES the amount of money that Bernie Madoff scammed from investors in his lifetime, yet it is also LESS than the MONTHLY EXCESS price the global population is being manipulated into paying for a barrel of oil.
Where is the outrage? Where are the investigations?
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, TOT, Shell, DB and Societe General founded the Intercontinental Exchange in 2000. ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws. The exchange was set up to facilitate "dark pool" trading in the commodities markets. Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se. They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.
A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate "round-trip" trades. Round-trip” trades occur when one firm sells energy to another and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple.
"Traders of the the ICE core membership (GS, MS, BP, DB, RDS.A, GLE & TOT) wouldn’t really have to put much money at risk by their standards in order to move or support the global market price via the BFOE market. Indeed the evolution of the Brent market has been a response to declining production and the fact that traders could not resist manipulating the market by buying up contracts and “squeezing” those who had sold oil they did not have. The fewer cargoes produced, the easier the underlying market is to manipulate." - Chris Cook, Former Director of the International Petroleum Exchange, which was bought by ICE.
How widespread are “round-trip’‘ trades? The Congressional Research Service looked at trading patterns in the energy sector and this is what they reported: This pattern of trading…
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Friday Market Follies - Up, Up and Away?
by Phil - September 11th, 2009 8:27 am
And away we go!
We have finally broken through all of our breakout levels and no one is more surprised than I am to see this coming without a pullback (perhaps David Fry - see chart on right). We will, of course, remain cautious through the weekend but we’re already preparing to throw caution to the wind (sort of) as I’ve posted a primer for our Buy/Write Strategy, so we can start picking up the stocks we want at roughly 15-20% discounts. This is why we can afford to be patient as we wait for our breakout levels - WE DON’T MISS ANYTHING! At PSW, we can STILL buy BAC for $14.41 (16% off) and C for $3.43 (27% off) and PARD for $3.79 (51% off) and now that we have made our tops, we feel a lot more comfortable working in at those prices than we would have when the market was 20% lower in early July.
Hopefully that floor holds (Dow 8,000). We’re looking good so far as our breakout levels have been Dow 9,600, S&P 1,030, Nasdaq 2,038, NYSE 6,700 and Russell 577 and now they form a floor we will be able to watch so we’ll know when to be worried that the rally is running out of steam.
We are also well-protected with our disaster hedges from the Aug 24th post and, if you don’t have any - it’s still a good idea to get some (and cheaper now too!). Only 2 33% (off the top) levels remain and that’s 1,056 on the S&P and 6,959 on the NYSE and we will be officially raising our mid-point from Dow 8,650 to 9,500 if we can take those out and hold them for a day or two, which will make 9,000 our new expected floor on the Dow and that means we should be buying here! There’s no point in having watch levels if we don’t act on them.
The dollar continues to fall and that’s supporting oil and gold but not the Nikkei, who fell 100 points off their open and finished down .666% for the day as the dollar failed to hold 91 Yen against the world’s mightiest currency. Even a 50-point "stick save" into the Nikkei close couldn’t paint a positive close for the day. A 100-point boost into the close was enough to give the Hang Seng a 91 point gain on the day, capping off a 700-point week (3.5%) and exactly 10% off the September 2nd low at 19,500, matching the Aug 4th…
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Short Weekly Wrap-Up
by Phil - July 3rd, 2009 8:14 am
Wheee, what a great way to end the week!
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we had gone into the day flipping our short firepower to BG $60 puts at $1.30 and TOT $55 puts at $1.20 as well as our remaining DIA $84 puts at .84. We went back to cash for the weekend but consider that the DIA $84 puts finished at $2.04 (up 142%), BG $60 puts finished at $2.10 (up 61%) and TOT $55 puts finished at $2.83 (135%) and you can see how even small allocations out of cash yield very nice one-day returns on put options. You do not have to take big risks to make big rewards, playing put options allows us to stay flexible and mainly in cash without "missing" too many market market moves.
We blew right through the upper targets I set in the morning and the Dow flew right down near enough our 8,250 (June lows) target that it looked bounceable, as the other indexes were holding up better than the Dow we felt we could play it for a small recovery over the weekend. We picked up some DIA $85 calls for .76 but elected not to DD at our scale-in target of .64 into the close as we already had bullish plays on ZION as well as Dow components AA, BA, GE and PFE, all longer-term plays that we are looking forward to adding to cheaper if they keep heading down. VLO and SNY were added in the afternoon as well as a UNG spread since they decided to just give it away at $13 again.
While we are just dipping our toes into some long posItions, it is the first time in a month we’ve been happy enough with the pricing to even take a chance. Of course we maintain our long put covers (just in case) but what’s the point of having protection if you have nothing to protect? On the whole, the volume simply wasn’t that impressive and we attribute much of this drop to people who were "shocked" that the economy isn’t as good as they thought it was (cough, Cramer fans, cough, cough) but it’s EXACTLY as weak as we thought it was and that means there are certain price points we are willing to hit long-term. Kudos to all who patiently waited with us for pretty much the whole month of June - now comes…
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Thrilling Thursday Morning - Jobless Recovery Edition
by Phil - July 2nd, 2009 8:26 am
As I mentioned yesterday, the ADP numbers were not good.
Now it’s one thing to see something happen and quite another to do something about it. One of the reasons we like to be in cash is we get to wait for the market to do something silly so we can bet against it. Yesterday was a gift as the Dow climbed all the way to 8,577 at 10:30 and we gave it a few minutes for the Crude Inventories, which were a disappointment for the oil bulls and our first Trade Alert of the day went out to Members at 10:35 saying: "OIH $95 puts are a good deal at $1.58." These trades don’t happen in a vacuum - we had been watching OIH all week and decided it was a safer short than USO, which also sold off nicely but the OIH was no slouch with the $95 puts finishing the day at $2.30 (up 45%).
Just a few minutes later, at 10:43, we were able to take advantage of the DIA $84 puts at .84, which finished the day at $1.08 (up 28%) and we were able to get back to cash while speculating on TOT $55 puts at $1.20 and BG $60 puts for $1.30 into today as we expected some downside follow-through to grip Europe, who were overly complacent yesterday. I wanted to mention this as I hear from many traders who are getting hit hard because they feel the need to stay "invested" for fear of missing something and the only thing you are missing in this market by not having a cash position is a good night’s sleep. Having cash allows us to pick our spots, make money and get back out to cash. We’re not day-traders but we sure as hell take our profits if we hit our goals in a day!
We’re still waiting for the market to pick a real direction but there are some things we do know and one of them is that oil is massively over-priced. AAA just released a report stating that the peak for gasoline prices has already passed and estimates that auto trips will be down 2.6% this summer. As I keep saying, people simply CAN’T afford to pay these pumped-up prices, no matter how much speculators wish it to be otherwise. Clearly the dumb money is following Goldman et al into the commodity game - just like last year and…
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China Pays Too Much for Oil in Iraq - $16 A Barrel!
by Phil - June 25th, 2009 7:42 am
How much smarter is China than the US?
Well let’s see - The US has spent $1,000,000,000,000 fighting in Iraq and thousands of our soldiers have died and we have secured ZERO barrels of oil for ourselves. China was not part of the coalition of the willing but, for just $8.8Bn, they are getting 550 Million barrels of oil, almost the size of the US’s entire strategic petroleum reserve, through the purchase of Addax Petroleum, and 20% of those reserves are in Iraq . While Bush filled our reserve up "at any price" and became the single largest buyer of crude in the world, filling our SPR at a rate of 2-3Mb a week at times, China simply waited patiently on the sidelines and is now coming in and buying wholesale. That’s pretty smart!
Of course patience is a renowned virtue of the Chinese and just one year after the US was paying over $100 a barrel to fill our own reserves, China’s Sinopec is doubling the country’s oil reserves with a single purchase at 1/6th the price. Sure they have to pump it ($4 per barrel) and ship it ($3 per barrel) as it’s not local but sometimes you have to travel a little to find bargains.
Earlier this year, Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani gave approval for foreign companies developing oil fields in the Kurdish region to export their crude directly to international markets. Addax was a beneficiary of the change and has been shipping oil since the start of this month. Addax is one of the largest independent oil producers in West Africa and the Middle East by volume. Aside from Kurdistan, it operates off Nigeria, an area that has seen huge exploration success in recent years. The company produced 136,500 barrels a day on average last year, or about 1.7% of China’s daily consumption.
So why is China still paying too much for oil? Sinopec is paying about $16 a barrel of proven and probable reserves. The average for African and Middle Eastern deals in 2008 — a year with triple-digit crude prices — was under $5 a barrel, according to consultants IHS Herold and Harrison Lovegrove & Co. Throw in Addax’s possible reserves and contingent natural-gas reserves and the multiple drops to just over $7 a barrel of oil equivalent. Your average buyer would never factor in such rosy assumptions. But then Sinopec, 66%-owned by the Chinese government, isn’t your average…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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