Crude oil is $86 today.... beginning of the end?

3.85 cash at the pump and 3.27 is my discount. I've never seen it this cheap ever around here!

 

Take a good look at Valero too. VERY interesting company. Check out their refinery capacity too. Sometimes they exceed Exxon for refinery capacity, and lately I think Exxon edged them back to #2 again, but still - for a company most have never heard of?

I wish we'd both bought Valero stock 25 years ago... Maybe we wouldn't be quite so bent over and road weary.

 

When crude was $149 people said "its going to $200 and beyond"... Then it tanked to $40 in 2008, "Its going to $10 and probably lower"...
Now people are convinced its going back to $40, LOL. One thing Im sure of is that everyone is wrong.
I have warned people for 5 years not to put all your eggs in the North Dakota basket, now I would warn, don't run out of there next week because you think you are going to lose your job. Relax. Breathe. Think. Take emotion out of the equation while making financial decisions.

 

And it falls again. Seems that lower oil prices are better for for consumers as they ultimately benefit businesses with the consumer having more disposable income. Airlines are the big winners, go figure, and of course the Arabs are not going to cut production.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2014/11/28/stocks-friday/19608677/

 

Have you noticed a slow down at Big Red?

 

Well, like I predicted a few posts ago, I study technical analysis and I could see that support was at $77 and at the time the price of oil was at $83 I believe. . I said if it dropped below this number of $77, all hell would break loose and oil will be in free fall.
Well today it tanked down to $66, after OPEC decided not to cut production, so there you go. Bingo!! The trend has been down for quite some time now, since July, so its anyone's guess where it will end up now. The only thing to stop it is to cut production.
I bought Diesel fuel at $3.11 just this past week in Louisiana, so I think I can safely say that the $3 barrier will be broken, in many parts of the country.
OPEC is in disarray and it's going to be hard to stop the trend as we see it.
Going to be interesting what 2015 will bring.
Enjoy and good luck

 

So is there any chance gasoline will drop below $2 a gallon?

 

I don't necassarily recommend looking for another job yet. I would wait it out a while to see what happens. We don't actually know where the break even numbers are. We see a lot of conjecture, but the proof is in the pudding as they say. We'll know when we see companies stacking their rigs and shutting wells in. Even then, I expect a short down cycle. The fall off in production of shale wells plus the increase in consumption with lower prices will push the supply/demand back into more normal ranges. It is fairly well kown that Saudis like an $80-90 barrel price and that is also a reasonable price for shale oil...so I expect it to find its way back to that fairly quick...maybe mid to late 2015?

It will be interesting...and possibly painful..to watch this unfold over the next few months.

 

How low can it go? Oil, gas prices in freefall as OPEC reels from US fracking

 

The U.S. has had a singular focus since 1973... Ruin OPEC. The U.S. has pitted the Saudi's against all other OPEC Nations since 1973 and the fruits of that meddling are finally about to come home to roost. Very soon, technology will make oil production even cheaper than it is today, when the total cost is $25 per barrel delivered to a refinery (I think that will happen in the next 10 years) we could see $40 being a standard steady price for the long term. That would completely dissolve OPEC and cause a meltdown of the middle east. When dictators can no longer buy the happiness of their minions we will see an "Arab Spring" in every country on the African and East Asian Continents. The Arabian Peninsula will surely be Nuclear by then, Iran, Sadi Arabia, Pakistan, India, and Turkey will have a "mutual destruction spring". We won't know who is fighting internally, or fighting off foreign threats. It will be WW3.
THAT is how we insure the Petro Dollar does not get replaced with Euro or some other currency.