The Brent futures flat price for the prompt contract has seen a relatively volatile morning. Price action initially held just below the $86/bbl mark, however, after reaching lows of $85.55/bbl at 08:45 GMT, prices found support to climb to $86.17/bbl come 09:40 GMT. Looking at the CFTC data for the week to Mar 19, in Brent futures we saw a flip of sentiment in managed by money players to adopt a strong bullish position. Bullish speculators added over 50mbbls (+16%) of length, the greatest weekly increase since Aug’18, whilst their bearish counterparts removed almost 8mbbls (-10%) of short positioning. WTI speculators followed a similar course increasing their length by 37.4mbbls (+19%), coupled with a decrease of 7.6mbbls (-20%) of short positions. Rosneft’s Kuibyshev oil refinery in Russia has halted the CDU-5 refining unit, which has a production power of 70kbbls/d, after a drone attack suffered over the weekend. The Indian government has granted permission to ADNOC to all them to export crude oil stored in underground strategic storages located in Mangalore, which have a capacity of 1.5 million mt. The front and 6-month Brent futures spreads are at $0.59/bbl and $4.08/bbl, respectively.
