Saudi Arabia and Russia just destroyed the oil price rally, potentially putting an end to all the speculation about what the group might do next. But higher production doesn't necessarily mean higher oil prices are entirely out of the question, and in fact, the oil market is still faced with a ton of uncertainty.
"We will not let go of our current approach until we reach a balanced market," Saudi oil minister Khalid al-Falih said Monday at a news conference in Riyadh.
There will be an OPEC deal extension—no matter the public tussling between opposing forces in the industry cartel—if the world's largest oil producers are really determined to end the supply glut.
In options trading, a straddle is literally a sit-on-the-fence strategy. By purchasing a put and a call at the same strike (price of underlying commodity) for the same time period, an investor isn’t making a conventional directional bet; rather the investor is looking for a big move either up or down. The rub is that the big move must be greater than the sum of the two option premia or the bet goes south. But that is in the nature of the trade.
Oil prices have cratered in recent weeks, dipping to their lowest levels in more than seven months and any sense of optimism has almost entirely disappeared.
Speaking this week at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference in New York, Total SA's chief energy economist, Joel Couse, forecasted that EVs will make up 15 to 30 percent of global new vehicle sales by 2030.
