I don't understand something about crude oil. Why would a terrorist attack make the price move up? Shouldn't it move down on travel jitters? And secondly, isn't supply data the most important thing. I have heard that the supply is huge and that future predicted supply will decrease. So after all this, why the increase in crude oil?
crude oil will go down in price on attacks that are not direct to the oil fields or infrastructure of the oil producing industry. Just as oil dropped with the london bombings. As I stated with my posting in the other oil thread {that seems to have disappeared?}, china/india high gdp numbers will keep the mean pricing of oil high, so any event will cause oil to move up from an already high pricing level. Events such as oil tanker disruptions, oil field/refining slowdowns, or new figures showing less then previously determined oil producers capacity will all cause possible big upward movements in oil pricing.
true-----------supply changes the oil pricing "mean" and refined product availability causes the short term moves in price away from the "mean". We have a situation where the mean is rising and there tends to be more events that cause pricing to keep spiking up from the mean----------not a good trend for the oil dependant economies.
=================== Torontoman; Not a prediction, but it could move down because time would fail me to tell of huge alternate energy sources; or people like me simply using Much less gas/oil than before. Also do understand those terrorists-losers are not to smart; they told a captalist country they would try to drive the price up-laughing out loud!!!!! Having said that ,ignore the many liars in American & Arab press. Oil has been up/downtrending, correcting long before terrorist punks hit the news. May want to get used to the fact that completely understanding market isnt likely; but observations , recording data like oil/gas uptrends may help. Recording corrections in oil/gas uptrends may help.
travel jitters only hurt the airlines... most going bankrupt after 911 and high jet fuel prices.. they can limit their losses by hedging their fuel use opposite their interest (ie go long on fuel they use and buy the oppropriate number of contracts that would be an estimate of their consumption)..