Fortune Watch

The torrent of earnings releases set to hit this week could only exacerbate volatility moves, analysts say. Volatility has knocked around stocks on Wall Street in record ways. Buckle up for the coming week.

News and concern over inter-bank lending, credit spreads and declining oil prices, the major averages managed to piece together a strong week that built on the lowest levels in five years.

So far in October, each day the Dow in ranges of no less than 250 points. In fact, the index saw the first 1,000-point swing in its history just over a week ago on Oct. 10. Most of this volatility has been blamed on the liquidation of assets of hedge funds and mutual funds. Rumors of poor performance at major players intensified the effect.

“No doubt the indiscriminate selling we’ve seen has been liquidation, no doubt. Everything is for sale,” says Art Hogan, chief market analyst with Jefferies. Hogan points out that all the indexes have fallen by roughly the same percentage, which indicates that funds are not selling stocks in one industry to invest in another.

The news about the deleveraging of the hedge fund industry is already behind the event, to a certain extent. A lot of hedge funds have a very high level of cash right now. As we come into next week, the question now is whether cash levels are high enough for everyone’s comfort and is the indiscriminate selling is behind us or not, and can we start focusing on fundamentals.
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The pace of global oil demand growth should increase next year as rising consumption in emerging markets outweighs declines in developed nations hard hit by the high fuel costs and mounting economic problems. The barrel of crude which sold for $65 in 2007 might soon cost $200.

With such astronomical increase coming on top of a credit crunch, economists are talking seriously about the prospect of world recession and, even the worse, stagflation – the lethal combination of inflation and economic stagnation last seen in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.

We are told it is all due to a world shortage cause by soaring demand for oil in China and India, and that we can expect record prices to continue for eight years.

But is this really the case? Nowhere in the world are people queuing at petrol pumps; there are no power blackouts and no idle tankers are waiting in the Gulf for oil.

On the contrary, oil storage tanks across the world are full, super tankers are queuing at ports to unload and no major oil field is closed. Across the world, 86million barrels of oil are produced every day which at the moment is sufficient, not least because consumption in America – which burns a quarter of the world’s supply every day – is actually declining.

Alarmists also say that the world’s oil supplies have passed their ‘peak’, that the world has consumed half of all its oil and that the remaining 1trillion barrels will be gone by 2025.

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Stock futures pointed to a higher open Monday as investors remained cautiously upbeat about the recent downturn in oil prices, which dipped further below $114 a barrel even as Tropical Storm Fay headed for Florida.

Light, sweet crude slipped 42 cents to $113.35 a barrel in premarket electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after rising in earlier trading.

Despite some worries in the market about Fay disrupting supplies from the Gulf of Mexico, oil remains near its lowest levels since early May, thanks to the dollar’s rebound and growing signs that developed economies around the world are slowing. Russia’s statement Monday that its troops have begun withdrawing from the conflict zone in Georgia also appeared to alleviate concerns about supplies from that region.

Dow Jones industrial futures rose 41, or 0.35 percent, to 11,704. Standard & Poor’s 500 index futures rose 3.20, or 0.25 percent, to 1,302.90, and Nasdaq 100 index futures rose 7.25, or 0.37 percent, to 1,972.75.

Last week, the Dow finished lower, but the S&P and the Nasdaq composite index ended up.

In earnings news on Monday, Lowe’s Cos. posted a nearly 8 percent drop in second-quarter profit. The results were better than expected, but the home improvement retailer also issued a disappointing outlook.

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Oil was unlikely to fall below $100 per barrel as strong demand from emerging economies such as China and India put a floor under prices, a member of Kuwait’s top oil council said in remarks published on Sunday.

Crude prices on the international market are unlikely to drop below $100 a barrel in the near term despite shedding almost $33 per barrel in a month, oil market experts said on Monday.

They say they don’t anticipate a full-blown collapse in crude prices despite a slowdown of the US economy, the world’s biggest oil importer. Neither do they see a major spike in crude prices due to the latest geopolitical tensions erupting between Russia and Georgia, which has led to Russia resorting to airstrikes and pounding Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi.

“The oil market doesn’t seem to be very perturbed by the happenings in Georgia. There is a downward bias in the oil market that will continue for a little while,” said Dalton Garis, associate professor of Economics at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi.

On Monday, in early trade, Brent crude futures on the ICE in London were trading a shade above $114 a barrel. In contrast, on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the Nymex crude oil futures for September delivery in the US were trading close to $116.50 per barrel.

“The crude prices in the near-term look like trading in a range of $100-$120 a barrel,” said an oil analyst, who didn’t want to be identified.

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In less than a month crude oil, which some saw hitting $200 a barrel by year-end, has plunged $32 but a rebound could happen, for example, over the Iranian nuclear crisis, analysts say. From a record-high $147.27 on July 11, the New York futures contract slid to about $115 on Friday, losing almost 22 per cent in the course of four weeks.

In its wake, most other commodity prices, which were driven higher by the oil market surge, have fallen from their peaks.

An ounce of gold has dropped to $800 from $1,000; farm commodity prices are between 25pc and 40pc lower and petrol prices have dropped about 6pc.

“Oil is at a tipping point. It is an exaggeration to cry that a bubble has burst. It is a break, Oil market was not in a bubble.”

For James Williams at WTRG Energy, the law of supply and demand reins.

“The market is simple reflecting the fundamentals of supply and demand. Markets participants are considering the world slowdown, the deterioration in expectations for the growth worldwide,” Williams said.

The slowdown in economic growth has a significant impact on energy consumption, analysts say.

A case in point is US drivers, known as huge consumers of petrol, drove a third less in May compared with a year ago. Motor fuel consumption fell more than 2pc.

This trend is expected to extend to the emerging market countries where the increasing weakening of fuel subsidies is going to force consumers to fill up their tanks less.

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U.S. stocks will continue to fall next week, in continuation of a sell-off that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average experience its worst week in over four years, due to nervousness that the easy-money binge of the last few years has come to an end. No fireworks in earnings so far.

It will be tough for Wall Street to shake off the bear market blues next week if the price of oil keeps rising and the earnings season kick-off from Alcoa and General Electric disappoints investors. Stocks will remain vulnerable to any new signs of distress from hedge funds hit by their exposure to bad U.S. home loans, as well as from credit markets, where Wall Street firms and corporations are finding it harder and harder to obtain financing.

Oil has become the biggest wild card for growth and corporate profits. It jumped to a record above $145 a barrel on Thursday, driven by tensions between Israel and Iran, before the long holiday weekend to mark US Independence Day.

The price of crude is up 50 percent so far this year.

On Friday, US markets are closed on July 4th for the Independence Day holiday.

Financial results from Alcoa and GE will kick off the second-quarter earnings season next week. Aluminum company Alcoa, the first Dow component to report results, will release its quarterly numbers on Tuesday. GE, another Dow industrial and a bellwether for the US economy, will report earnings on Friday. Aside from second-quarter results, investors are anxious to see the companies’ forecasts for world economic growth and their own corporate sales prospects.

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Soaring petrol prices helped drive up US consumer prices last month at the fastest rate in six months, the government said yesterday, but core prices remained tame, easing inflation fears in financial markets.

A separate report showed US consumer sentiment tumbling to a 28-year low this month, with some lessening of expectations on inflation one year out and a steady reading on long-term inflation expectations, which held at a 13-year high.

The Commerce Department said the Consumer Price Index rose a steep 0.6 per cent last month, a touch more than Wall Street had expected, after a modest 0.2pc gain in April.

However, so-called core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy cost, edged up just 0.2pc. Surging petrol prices and soft labour market conditions have depressed consumer spirits.

The Reuters/University of Michigan sentiment index for this month dropped to 56.7 from 59.8 last month. Wall Street economists had expected a decline to only 59.5.

“Today’s inflation numbers do not put any additional pressure on the Fed to hike interest rates,” said Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wachovia in Charlotte, North Carolina. “The Fed is not nearly as behind the curve as some people currently believe.”

The reassuring data followed a series of inflation warnings from central bankers around the globe, and capped off a week in which expectations of higher US rates had climbed sharply.

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Some say no. They say unlike the tech and real estate bubbles, there’s no overabundance of supply. Others say these high prices are not sustainable.

Oil prices have doubled in the past 12 months, surging nearly $8 a barrel in the past four days alone.

Big investment funds are putting money into oil futures as if Saudi Arabia’s spigots will run dry tomorrow. At the same time, the supply of oil and the demand for it hasn’t changed much in the last year.

So it raises the question: Is $135 oil nothing more than one big bubble? Some say no. They say unlike the tech and real estate bubbles, there’s no overabundance of supply. Others say these high prices are not sustainable.

The answer depends on who you ask.

A bubble is where supply overwhelms demand, pointing to previous bubbles – like the tech bubble in the late 1990s where companies with zero earnings issued massive amounts of stock, and the real estate market a decade later where home builders went on a frenzy, overshooting the number of homes the market could absorb.

“But unless I’m missing something here, I don’t see any massive increase in the supply of oil”.

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Crude oil futures pass $130 a barrel for the first time on supply concerns, weak dollar.

Crude oil prices are shooting further into record territory, breaking above $130 a barrel for the first time on persistent supply concerns and a weaker dollar and heading for $180 a barrel.

The July contract for light, sweet crude rose as high as $130.30 in electronic trade on the New York Mercantile Exchange late afternoon Wednesday in Singapore.

Concerns that OPEC won’t increase its crude production before September fed some of the buying. Also, the dollar has been weakening against the euro and yen the last two days after appearing to be on a recovery track.

Oil futures are now selling for about twice what they were just a year ago.

In the short term — say, the next two years or so — we’re looking at bad news about global oil supply that could take the price of a barrel of crude to $180.

Needless to say, today’s $3.50-a-gallon gasoline would look cheap if oil prices hit $180 a barrel. At that price for a barrel of oil, gasoline would cost somewhere north of $5.50 a gallon.

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