capitalism at it's finest. Oil goes down, little guy goes broke, big guy owns everything. Then oil goes up? Well, that's the risk, isn't it?
Only the Oil sector is negatively impacted by lower Oil prices and several other sectors actually benefit from lower Oil prices. That means US indexes aren't really impacted much at all by Oil prices. TSX yes, Oil matters. 10% correction already occurred from yearly highs.
The only way I see oil going back up is once OPEC starts to cut production which is a huge possibly before the end of the year if prices continue to head lower, I feel the whole time oil was above $60 a barrel it really had everything to do with speculation and the big guys trading it hand over fist and not taking a single barrel of ownership of the actual commodity...the funny thing is even after oil has dropped probably over $10 a barrel the last few weeks gas near me has been locked at the same price for over a month, regular price in anywhere from $2.85 to $3.25, months ago when oil was trading down to this level gas was probably 50 cents cheaper, so it seems the last time oil was in the low 40's consumers actually got some of the benefit, this time however gas isn't dropping as oil continues lower, I'm worried oil is going back to $50 -$60 and the price surging back to $3.50 a gallon....should be interesting to see where oil heads from these levels, any break below $40 and look out below.
The price of gas is heavily manipulated by refineries. Not surprised to see it not go down. Was very surprised to actually see it go down last December.
Why is Gasoline still $4.50 a gallon in North California? It's the same price per gallon when Crude was trading at $110. Xandman what's the reason, refineries down, fires, outages, radical crack-spread, only one refinery on the West Coast or "no new refineries have been built because the EPA has stopped them all!" story. I have no idea why I saw gasoline at $4.50 in San Jose while Hedge Funds are stumbling over each other to sell their MLPs(LINE,VNR,BBEP,ect..) while Big Oil stocks like CLR, WLL, XOM and CVX. Seeing OAS heading to the single digits is a trip. When Oil started to fall I shorted the Coal Stocks again because Oil seemed cheaper to get at these low prices and the World has less hatred. BTU fell from $6 to $1.00 and ANR is now $.26, what do you make of coal stocks, will any survive or come back as recapitalizations?