I'm going to be brief and straight to the point in this article.
Oil prices are currently being held up on the prospects of sanction risks on Russian crude exports.
Trump set a ceasefire deadline for August 8 between Russia and Ukraine. If no peace deal is reached, Trump is threatening to impose a 100% tariff rate on any country that buys Russian crude.
Those two countries are India and China.
But as we have seen time and time again, TACO Trump will likely delay this deadline, leaving the traders who bought oil at risk of frantically selling out of oil.
We are once again back to the headline-driven oil trading that gave traders stomach ulcers just earlier this summer. Meanwhile, the oil market signals that we watch closely are turning bearish.
Here's what we are seeing.
China Stops...
In our July 21 WCTW titled, Yellow Light. We wrote that China's SPR buying has propped up the global oil market. Based on everything we are seeing from tanker tracking data to import flows, China has stopped buying.