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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tomas who wrote (5880)	1/4/2002 7:48:43 PM
From: Tomas	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 206334

Speculators Begin to Reverse Bets on Falling Crude Oil Prices By Stephen Voss New York, January 4, 19:18 (Bloomberg) -- Speculators bought more oil futures contracts in New York than they sold in the week that ended Dec. 28, though they were far from erasing earlier bets that prices would fall. Hedge funds and other speculators had still sold 63,489 more crude oil contracts than they had bought, narrower than the previous week's ``net short'' position of 71,731, a report from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission showed. Speculators had been selling contracts as crude oil prices plunged late in the year, amassing a record net short position of 71,928 on Dec. 18. Crude oil has risen 10 percent since that date, erasing part of the 29 percent plunge in the previous three months, in a rally helped by speculators who bought contracts to reverse their earlier bets. ``At least some speculators have decided enough is enough,'' said Tim Evans, senior energy analyst at IFR Pegasus in New York. ``It takes weeks for these positions to evolve or be worked off. It doesn't all happen in the space of three days, when it took three months or so to put the positions on.'' Crude oil futures have risen on the New York Mercantile Exchange on signs that members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are starting to implement a new round of supply cuts. For every seller of a futures contract there's a buyer, so while speculators are net short in crude oil contracts, so-called ``commercial'' traders, such as refiners and fuel marketers, are net long. Since speculators tend to buy and sell at a faster pace than companies that use the market to hedge their future inventory flow, it's the speculator positions that traders watch for sentiment about the direction of prices. The following table shows the changes in ``non-commercial,'' or speculator, positions for Nymex crude oil, gasoline, heating oil and natural gas futures. A negative figure in the final column means shorts exceed longs. Contract Date Longs Shorts Longs Minus Shorts Crude oil Dec. 28 12,277 75,766 -63,489 Crude oil Dec. 21 11,902 83,633 -71,731 Gasoline Dec. 28 5,845 7,817 -1,972 Gasoline Dec. 21 6,325 11,401 -5,076 Heating oil Dec. 28 5,388 13,450 -8,062 Heating oil Dec. 21 5,364 15,239 -9,875 Natural gas Dec. 28 3,255 36,358 -33,103 Natural gas Dec. 21 9,591 36,465 -26,874