Tuesday night at 9:30pm GMT (4:30pm EST) the Inventory numbers for Petroleum products was released from the American Petroleum Institute (API). These figures come out the night before the more important and widely watched Department Of Energy figures which come out during the active trading period near the open of the market in the USA. Past few weeks these inventory numbers have come out with a draw, or with a negative deviation, indicating lower supplies and thus prices have moved higher. Well the Energy companies must have been listening and increased their production because last night the API numbers came out higher, indicating a build in inventory, this caused prices to move lower. Here are the numbers:
API PETROLEUM INVENTORIES: CRUDE: +5.2M V -2ME; GASOLINE: -500K V -1ME; DISTILLATE: -310K V -1.5ME; UTILIZATION: 83.6% V 84.2%E
- Cushing crude inventory: 460K to 33.38M barrels
Liquidity at the time of this release is quite thin, however there was ample time and liquidity to enter safely as long as the trade was not a huge amount of contracts. The concern can be more about how price action can be rather fidgety, especially when trading energy futures which are probably have the most volatile price fluctuations. Trading the CL Futures contract is $10 per 1 cent change in price unless you have access to CFDs or a Spreadbet platform. Regardless some patience was needed, if the trader was able to get in quickly as soon as the news was released then some ticks were safely locked in, as the first retracement after the news was very shallow, just some 10 ticks and hardly a 23%, which is just not enough for me personally usually unless the deviation is very good. About 4 minutes after the release, a decent 38% retracement occurred, it was front-run by a few pips by was good enough. The Crude Oil Future then moved off this 81.20 level down to nearly 80.90, for about +25 ticks after spread, although various take-profit levels are circled in the chart, taking profits on portions of the trade as you go. This was on a news afterspike trade, one may have also straddled this report and got a much better fill.
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