oil price trading

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Oil Trading Alert: Is the Rally Over?

August 12, 2016, 4:54 AM Nadia Simmons

Trading position (short-term; our opinion): Long positions (stop loss at $37.23; initial upside target at $46.90) are justified from the risk/reward perspective.

Crude oil declined on Wednesday only to shoot up with vengeance yesterday, exceeding the previous August highs. Still, crude oil declined a bit before the session was over, so many investors are wondering if the rally is already over – is this the case?

Most likely – no. Let’s take a closer look at the chart (charts courtesy of http://stockcharts.com).

WTIC crude oil daily chart

After closing the short positions in crude oil on August 1, we were waiting for a bullish confirmation and in August 9 Oil Trading Alert, we wrote the following:

From today’s point of view, we see that the situation developed in line with the above scenario and crude oil extended gains yesterday. With Monday’s increase, the commodity not only increased to our upside target, but also climbed higher and closed the day above the lower border of the black declining trend channel. In this way, light crude invalidated earlier breakdown under this short-term support, which in combination with buy signals generated by the daily indicators and invalidation of the breakdown under the 200-day moving average and a weekly closure above the long-term black declining line suggests further improvement in the coming days. If this is the case, and crude oil moves higher from here, we’ll see an upward move to (at least) the upper border of the black declining trend channel (currently around $46.90) in near future.

In short, the above remains up-to-date, despite yesterday’s upswing. The rally was sizable from a day-to-day perspective, but crude oil didn’t reach even the closest of the more significant resistance levels. In our opinion – at this moment – it is most likely that crude oil will move to $50 or so and even if it doesn’t, a move to a least $47 is still most likely as we don’t have anything important enough to stop the black gold before it moves to this level.

Summing up, Tuesday’s move lower turned out to be a correction within a short-term move higher and yesterday’s rally just confirmed it. The short-term outlook remains bullish as the key resistance levels were not yet reached.

Very short-term outlook: bullish
Short-term outlook: bullish
MT outlook: bullish
LT outlook: mixed

Trading position (short-term; our opinion): Long positions (with a stop loss order at $37.23 and initial upside target at $46.90) are justified from the risk/reward perspective. We will keep you informed should anything change, or should we see a confirmation/invalidation of the above.

As a reminder – “initial target price” means exactly that – an “initial” one, it’s not a price level at which we suggest closing positions. If this becomes the case (like it did in the previous trade) we will refer to these levels as levels of exit orders (exactly as we’ve done previously). Stop-loss levels, however, are naturally not “initial”, but something that, in our opinion, might be entered as an order.

Since it is impossible to synchronize target prices and stop-loss levels for all the ETFs and ETNs with the main market that we provide this level for (crude oil), the stop-loss level and target price for popular ETN and ETF (among other: USO, DWTI, UWTI) are provided as supplementary, and not as “final”. This means that if a stop-loss or a target level is reached for any of the “additional instruments” (DWTI for instance), but not for the “main instrument” (crude oil in this case), we will view positions in both crude oil and DWTI as still open and the stop-loss for DWTI would have to be moved lower. On the other hand, if crude oil moves to a stop-loss level but DWTI doesn’t, then we will view both positions (in crude oil and DWTI) as closed. In other words, since it’s not possible to be 100% certain that each related instrument moves to a given level when the underlying instrument does, we can’t provide levels that would be binding. The levels that we do provide are our best estimate of the levels that will correspond to the levels in the underlying assets, but it will be the underlying assets that one will need to focus on regarding the sings pointing to closing a given position or keeping it open. We might adjust the levels in the “additional instruments” without adjusting the levels in the “main instruments”, which will simply mean that we have improved our estimation of these levels, not that we changed our outlook on the markets.

Thank you.

Nadia Simmons
Forex & Oil Trading Strategist
Przemyslaw Radomski, CFA
Founder, Editor-in-chief, Gold & Silver Fund Manager

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