Hedge funds are betting that the oil-price crash is close to ending. Speculators boosted their net-long position in West Texas Intermediate crude by 14 percent in the week ended December 2, the most in 20 months, US Commodity Futures Trading Commission data show. Short bets contracted by 15 percent as long wagers expanded 4 percent.
Oil’s collapse accelerated after the 12-nation Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries decided November 27, to maintain output levels, underscoring the price war in crude. Oil tumbled into a bear market in October and reached a five-year low last week as the US shale boom added to a global glut at a time of weakening demand growth.
“A lot of people are betting that the selloff is overdone,” John Kilduffa partner at Again Capital LLC, a New York-based hedge fund that focuses on energy, said. “We haven’t seen these levels in years. They represent extreme value to some folks.”
WTI slumped $7.21, or 9.7 percent, to $66.88 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange in the period covered by the CFTC report. Prices extended declines from the lowest close in more than five years dropping 73 cents to $65.11 in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 12:42 pm Singapore time. Brent, the global benchmark, slid 81 cents to $68.26.
The price floor is now at about $60 or even less, companies including Deutsche Bank AG, BNP Paribas SA and Petromatrix GmbH said at the end of last month.
OPEC, responsible for about 40 percent of the world’s oil supply, kept its collective output target at 30 million barrels a day. WTI plunged a combined 10 percent that day and the next.
“There is a case for the longer-term investor that sees a discount in current prices,” Harry Tchilinguirian, BNP Paribas SA’s London-based head of commodity markets strategy, said on December 5. “If your investment horizon is indeed long term, oil prices will be reversed higher.”
Shares outstanding of the four biggest US exchange-traded funds that follow oil prices, including the United States Oil Fund and ProShares Ultra Bloomberg Crude Oil, increased to 86.9 million on December 4, the most since January 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Investors added $98 million into the four funds in the first four days of the month, following a $559.85 million inflow in November that was the most since June 2012.
“People are thinking that we’ve hit the bottom and it can only go up,” Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Winchester, Massachusetts said. “$70 is the new $100.”
Banks including BNP Paribas and Barclays Plc cut their price forecasts after the OPEC decision. BNP reduced next year’s WTI estimate to $70, from $88, and Barclays to $66, from $85.
Net-long positions for WTI jumped by 22,365 to 184,374 futures and options. Long positions rose 4 percent to 256,667. Short bets dropped to 72,293, according to the CFTC. Even with the gains, the net-long position is still about half of what it was in June.
Speculators have misjudged markets before. They increased the net-long position by 8.7 percent in the week ended Nov. 11, only for prices to drop 16 percent since then.
WTI tumbled to $32.40 in December 2008, from a record $147.27 that July, prompting OPEC to cut quotas by 2.46 million barrels a day.
“A lot of people thought that once the market dropped so dramatically, it didn’t have that much further to go,” Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at the Price Futures Group in Chicago said. “It’s almost like a sense of denial of what’s going on.”
