Poor Air Traffic Numbers To Continue, While Summer Continues To Evade Us

Back from long sunny weekend in Budapest, where things are beautiful and the word recession does not seem to exist in both sides of the Danube river, SFOT sees nothing but gloomy London, sub 20 degrees and raining. Though the one thing that has held British pride forever is the GBP, which is showing unbelievable strength. Readers will know SFOT has dipped into a small long in the GBP/USD pair and the target has been reached, hence will take off a little and leave the rest on a trailing stop basis. He still believes there are more stops out there to be taken out on the upside.

Back to oil, where the pressure today should have been on the downside, but nevertheless we are being drawn up here by the strength of EUR/USD. The only man that matters, Mr Al-Naimi of Saudi, reaffirms that there is no need for any production cut at this meeting. However, as per the past few weeks, or months, financial markets have been the key to this run up in flat price, and the theme shall continue. Guys trading the chart below might be tempted to be short Eur/Usd vs Brent, and SFOT cannot go against this trade at this moment.

Middle distillate cracks still look very weak, however there is a little development in Jet fuel over the past few weeks, where it seems airlines are preparing for increased summer demand and upped their hedging activities, pushing Jet fuel prices higher out to 1 year. Similar activities happened around this time last year, and the result was the collapsed of several airlines, notably smaller chartered companies. Jet differential was pushed up to an incredible $150 usd/tonne over gasoil in europe, whereas now the premium is around $45.

SFOT understands that Jet fuel stocks are still in abundance, and therefore he cannot see how Jet fuel differential can continue to climb unless demand for summer holidays on planes really picks up. The latest release from IATA seems to point the other way unfortunately and SFOT will attempt to wear a little risk in selling Jet diffs here.

Subscribe by RSS Subscribe by Email