Energy & precious metals - weekly review and outlook

investing.com:

Investing.com — This isn’t how the Saudis imagined it would be. There’s also no certainty after this that it’ll play out the way they want it to be.

We’re talking, of course, about the so-called demand for oil and how it's weighing on crude prices, which reached July lows of beneath $75 a barrel in the just-ended week. 

While the Saudi-Russia led oil producing alliance OPEC+ has a meeting on Nov. 26 that could again introduce a tighter supply mentality in the market, the group’s exports for now are rising. Latest OPEC+ data shows an expected seasonal rise of 180,000 barrels led by Iraq and Iran.

In the meanwhile, buying of oil for speculative purposes had plunged. 

“The petroleum buyers are gone, unless you are talking oil call options, as supply and demand take a back seat to rising macroeconomic fears,” Phil Flynn, energy analyst at Chicago’s Price Futures Group, wrote as crude futures finished with a third straight week of losses after a four-month low earlier in the week. “Maybe the buyers of oil have been taken away from the mother ship or maybe they have just ridden off into the sunset, but the reality is we are seeing a short oil position of epic proportions as the market seems to remove the risk of ever rising again.”

To hear one of the market’s loudest oil bulls admit that people have been fleeing the long crude game like rats abandoning a sinking ship should be a wake-up call to those who kept drumming for a return to $100 pricing in recent weeks.

“Underneath it all, the crash in the price of oil is either a very ominous sign for the state of the global economy or a sign that it is being driven by fear and not on supply and demand fundamentals,” said Flynn. “The oil market swing in mood has gone from pricing in