It has been a rough 2 years for forecasters of crude oil prices. Essentially no one saw the 2014 crash coming, and everyone looked on in surprise as a barrel of crude oil tanked, from over $100 to less than $30. After the crash, many forecasters expected a speedy recovery driven by bankruptcies in U. S. Shale, only to be left surprised again by the slow pace of the structural adjustment of supply to demand, causing the crude oil price to remain in the $30 to $50 per barrel range much longer than anticipated. And now, just as everyone has begun forecasting ‘lower for longer’, crude oil seems to be breaking through the $50 per barrel range in response to the announcement that OPEC and Russia intend to cut production.
All these surprises did not happen because crude oil price forecasters are ‘quacks’ and ‘charlatans’ who don’t really know what they are doing. Rather, the issue is the large number of real world factors that impact the crude oil price – economic growth; interest and exchange rates; demographics; global, regional and local politics;weather conditions; et cetera – and the general unpredictability of these factors. On top of this, the global economy’s financial markets have made it possible for the crude oil price to move disconnected from these factors. Speculator sentiment can make the crude oil price move in anticipation of an event, that is before something has actually happened, and by more than is justified by the event (‘overshoot’).
Clearly, this makes crude oil price forecasting exceptionally difficult. That does not mean, however, there is no value in doing it.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Oct 24, 2016.
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