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All Noise, No Substance
Oil

All Noise, No Substance

Spoiler alert: Trump will try to talk down on oil prices every chance he gets. Get used to it.

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HFI Research
Jan 23, 2025
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Just a week ago when WTI was approaching $80/bbl, I wanted to remind everyone what oil trading/investing is like with Trump now as the President.

And he did not disappoint. Just 3 days after he became the 47th President of the United States of America, he said:

So is $75/bbl WTI too high? No, and that's not really the point. When it comes to oil prices, Trump has two spectrums: too low and too high.

There is no such thing as the "right" price.

I remember that during the 2018 to 2019 era, Trump talked about how oil prices were too high when WTI traded around $55 to $57/bbl. It was only during the COVID pandemic lockdown that sent oil prices near $0/bbl before Trump stepped in to say that oil prices were too low.

And this is an important point to understand because even if WTI fell to $55/bbl, Trump will still believe that oil prices are too high, and at that price, you can expect US oil production to fall by ~1 million b/d y-o-y.

This is why all the tweets or talks about oil prices being too high are nothing but noise and contain very little substance. Following the 2018 Iranian sanction debacle, the Saudis have no stomach to prematurely react to any Trump-related oil price news. We saw this evidenced in 2019 when Saudi forced the rest of OPEC+ to an agreement (at the end of 2018).

For readers aware of this particular insight, it's best to ignore everything Trump tweets/talks about on oil. The price is never low enough, so he will constantly talk about lower oil prices.

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