Trading Crude Oil

The market was anticipating a build up of crude oil inventory this week as refiners are not all that keen on buying $136 oil. They cannot sell the refined product at a decent profit.

That's right, the price of gasoline should actually be higher based on the price of crude oil.

Why isn't it?

Count the number of gas stations in your neighborhood. There are simply too many and the competition is fierce. They really only make money selling all the "junk" in the store, not by selling gasoline.

Anyway back to the trading, in this case the pre inventory report guessing was correct as the price just kept falling after the report was released.

Nice day to trade.

If at first you don't suceed

Barrel counting day is usually a great day to trade crude oil. I had no trades before the news and waited for the market to settle down a little after the 8:35 MST U.S. Department of Energy oil inventory report.

The news was fairly benign and the market did not launch one way or another to any great degree. I started getting signals and initiated a couple of trades that were stopped out quickly. Between 8:45 and 9:21 I had 5 trades, 4 stop outs and 1 break even.

What to do?

I may have mumbled some bad things, shut down the charts, and then went and bought a coffee.

With some sober second thought made a decision to wait until after the New York lunch hour and then come back to the market and see what happens.

So the first chart below shows the action around the first 5 trades and the second chart shows the action around the next 7.

Needless to say the trading went a lot better in the my "after coffee" trading session.

While I did turn a losing day into a winner I could have also just added to the losses. The key was to STOP for a while, clear my head, and come back to the market without the revenge trading attitude.

Trading is hard.

Click on chart to view

After coffee trading