Well, that was ugly. Nothing for bulls of any kind to latch onto last week:
- Markets deteriorated technically, and political hurdles to the market's progress, once hurdled, seemed not to matter.
- GDP came in strong but was not the sort of sustainable strength (an inventory issue vs real demand) that the market needs to see.
- Oil fell with the equity markets and although crude and product inventories are more in line with historic norms than they have been for a year, there is little in the way of fresh demand in the U.S.
- On the natural gas front, warm weather yielded an abnormally smallish withdrawal for this week of the year but a more important blow to any bullish sentiment came Friday as the EIA reported another month (data is now through November 2009) with nothing in the way of production declines - See the Monday post for the usual gas supply slide show. I would expect a number of analysts to trim their 2010 gas price deck as a result.
In progress ....
HK – bigger than expected reserves, big beat on 4Q production as expected, operations update looks strong