And has the prompt and the forward pricing curve emphatically shared your viewpoint since you started posting on this thread ? In terms of OPEC's price fixing influence it's fairly well established at this point that the United States and Canada have the supply and production capabilities to have considerable say in the matter.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/arti...aders-are-looking-at-the-wrong-inventory-data This is an excellent article. You guys might want to read it. Pretty much is on par with my thesis.
The neat thing about trading oil futures is that you really don't need any knowledge of the oil market to trade it. Technicals will tell you what you need to know. Fundamentals are all reflected in the pricing.
From my personal experience trading in the commercial energy markets - it's about as "instantaneous" as markets get. If supply or demand fundamentals change, a commercial desk will 'adjust market valuations accordingly'. Their bonus structure is based upon value added in terms of price improvement, cost optimization, risk avoidance, and arbitrage revenues. At least one commercial desk have intimate, first-hand knowledge not available to other market participants by virtue of their operations.
If fundamentals were more or less "instantaneously" reflected in price, then there would not be trends of any duration; there would just be prices jumping from one end point to another in immediate reflection of such fundamentals.
Fundamentals all have variation. That's why markets jump so much around every inventory report. Because they have variation you have to apply discount rates to have a present value. This is how all finance works. Just as AAPL has long term fundamentals, those fundamentals are all heavily discounted in the present. As the old saying goes, the only constant is change.
There are other factors beside fundamentals in price. This is why fundamental analysis is way overvalued.