$93.1520
WTI tests $95 and Brent approaches $100 as ascending triangles signal upside pressure. Middle East risks and U.S. CPI could drive the next oil move.
The light-sweet crude oil market rallied a bit during the trading session here on Tuesday as Americans came back to work and liquidity returned to normal levels.
That being said, the $95 level seems to be a bit of a barrier, and it is difficult to break out from there, at least from what we see.
Short-term pullbacks could open up the possibility of finding value hunters here as well, as momentum is certainly to the upside over the last couple of weeks. And it’s worth noting that we are forming an ascending triangle.
The Brent market looks very much the same. Its barrier is the $100 level, the top of an ascending triangle. The market did try to reach that area and break above it, but it did pull back pretty significantly early.
It will be a situation where, unfortunately, you’re going to have to watch the latest headlines coming out of Tehran and Washington, D.C., and to a lesser extent, Tel Aviv.
And with that, it is going to be a very erratic situation.
We get CPI numbers coming out on Friday that could give us a heads-up as to whether or not the Federal Reserve is going to tighten next week. With that jobs number last week really throwing people for a loop, that could come into play.
But really, at this point, most of what I think the market’s paying attention to is what it’s been paying attention to for months now: the conflict in the Middle East.
Until that is resolved, the market is going to have trouble finding calm, I believe.
Right now, one would have to assume that a lot of traders really don’t know what to do, and I’d be interested to find out how many have just simply decided not to participate.
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Chris is a proprietary trader with more than 20 years of experience across various markets, including currencies, indices and commodities. As a senior analyst at FXEmpire since the website’s early days, he offers readers advanced market perspectives to navigate today’s financial landscape with confidence.