The financial services sector experienced the highest FPI outflows amounting to Rs 23,283 crore. This starkly contrasted with September when FPIs had invested Rs 27,200 crore in the same sector. The report indicates that foreign investors are adopting a cautious approach toward the Indian market, particularly in the financial sector.

The oil, gas, and consumable fuels sectors also suffered significant outflows of Rs 12,371 crore. Similarly affected was the automobile and auto components sector with outflows amounting to Rs 8,131 crore in October. The report highlighted that most sectors failed to attract significant FPI inflows during this period.

One exception was the chemicals sector which saw modest FPI inflows of Rs 552 crore – marking it as having received the highest inflow among all sectors.

This data underscores growing concerns among foreign investors regarding India’s current economic outlook, particularly in sectors sensitive to global market fluctuations. It is noted that continued selling by FPIs may affect market sentiment and create further volatility in these key sectors.

October has recorded historic levels of FPI outflows with foreign investors having sold a net Rs 77,701 crore in equities so far this month – surpassing even the COVID-19-induced sell-off of March 202 when Rs61,972.75 crore was offloaded.

This makes October a historic month for heavy selling pressure by FPIs and signals an unprecedented level of caution from foreign investors towards Indian markets amidst ongoing economic challenges globally.

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The maximum retail price (MRP) of urea and ammonia has remained unchanged, however on Wednesday, the Union Cabinet approved the “continuation of the urea subsidy scheme” with a view to ensure supply of the fertilizer “at the same price”.

The fact is that urea sales in India, the second largest consumer of Urea after China, crossed a record 35.7 million tonnes (mt) during 2022-23, as against 30.6 mt in 2021-22. The current Indian government’s initiatives such as compulsory neem coating, reducing the bag size from 50 kg to 45 kg, and launch of the so-called Nano Urea haven’t helped bring down the consumption of this fertilizer containing 46 per cent nitrogen (N).

The reason is simple: When urea retails at a fifth or even less than that of most other fertilizers, why should farmers cut back on its use? It’s another thing that the disproportionate application of N has, over time, resulted in diminishing crop yield response. Studies have shown that 1 kg of N, P (phosphorus) and K (potassium) used to yield 12 kg-plus of cereal grains during the 1960s, but only 5 kg now.

In Pakistan the demand is even higher and so the prices are, as we witnessed in the latest large Tender in Pakistan.

The tender was opened on Monday and some five international suppliers submitted offers for the supply of urea. A bidder, namely Syed Allauddin & Company, regretted. Lowest bid of $389.9 per metric ton was submitted by ABG Trading and it was agreed to supply 100,000 metric tons of urea. West Trade International offered to supply 50,000 metric tons of urea at $ 394.49 per metric ton at Karachi and $ 404.90 per metric ton for Gwadar. Another bid was received from Key Trade for supply of 100,000 metric ton urea at $405.50 per metric ton.

Agri Commodities offered to supply 200,000 metric tons urea at $414 per metric ton and SAMSUNG quoted $419 per metric ton for Karachi and $ 420 per metric ton for Gwadar port for supply of 50,000 metric tons.

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We had a long position on Crude June 2023 which we also posted it here which hit the profit target and now there is a new analysis on Crude Oil price which can impact all oil products in 2024’s first quarter.

Now the price of Crude oil is in a resisting area, with a potential to bearish divergence, so we would be waiting for the next days opening price and will consider to go short on Crude Oil on Tuesday probably.

The stop loss of this analysis is above the resistance area and the target is the below support.

This analysis is brought to you free and should not be considered as a trading signal. the purpose of this post is just studying the probability of price movements in Crude oil market and its probable impact on other oil products’ prices.

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Former U.S. President Trump abandoned the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on Tehran in late 2018.

Until then, Europe and Turkey had consumed close to 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Iranian oil. India, Iran’s biggest client after China, was buying as much as 480,000 bpd in the fiscal year beginning April 2018.

At least one European refiner has held in-depth discussions with Iran’s state oil firm NIOC on resuming purchases and Indian refiners say they plan to reduce spot purchases to make way for Iranian contract barrels.

India, the world’s third largest oil consumer and importer, halted imports from Tehran in 2019 after a temporary waiver granted to some countries expired.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration and Iran have engaged in indirect talks to revive the pact for Tehran to curb its nuclear activities in exchange for a lifting of sanctions.

Iran does not disclose its oil exports data, but assessments based on tanker tracking show exports fell from a peak of 2.8 million bpd to as low as 200,000 bpd in 2018. Analysts expect Iran to ramp up crude exports to 1.5 million bpd in the fourth quarter when sanctions are lifted.

Several Indian state refiners, whose refineries are suited to the crude, have committed to buying Iranian oil once sanctions are lifted. Indian refiners have raised the share of spot purchases to take advantage of cheaper barrels in a surplus market and replaced lost Iranian cargoes with U.S. oil.

State-run Bharat Petroleum Corp, which plans to tap the spot market for 45% of its overall imports, will buy Iranian oil if sanctions are lifted, a company spokesman said.
High sulphur distillate-rich Iranian crude suits BPCL’s Kochi refinery and costs $2-$2.5/barrel less than similar grades, he said.

Hindustan Petroleum Corporation (HPCL) also said it would buy Iranian crude given the right price and economic suitability, its chairman M. K. Surana told Reuters.

Top refiner Indian Oil Corp expects to reduce spot purchases and can easily process about 2 million tonnes (14.6 million barrels) of Iranian oil this fiscal year, said a company source, who declined to be named.

An official at Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd said his company would also cut spot purchases and buy Iranian oil.

The resumption of Iranian oil supplies will help India replace lower supplies from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which have curbed output to support oil prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.

(Reporting by Nidhi Verma in Delhi and Julia Payne in London; editing by Barbara Lewis – source)

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Bunkers beneath Mariupol’s Azovstal steel works, a giant factory complex whose hulking chimneys dominated the city’s skyline, offered Ukrainian fighters and civilians a place to hide out — under harrowing conditions — for weeks after the rest of the city had fallen to Russian forces.

The bunkers at the Azot Chemical Association factory in Sievierodonetsk, an industrial city on the banks of the Siversky Donets River, appear to be playing a similar role. As the city is pounded by Russian forces trying to take the last parts of Luhansk Province that have defied their grasp, fighters at the plant, just a few blocks from the river, have held out.

Hundreds of civilians are trapped at the plant and a spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Saviano Abreu, said that “people are suffering and experiencing constant shelling and bombardment.”

Dmytro Firtash, whose company, Group DF, owns the plant, said in a statement this month that among the civilians were employees who had stayed to safeguard “what is left of the plant’s highly explosive chemicals.”
Mr. Firtash is a Ukrainian energy tycoon who, in 2019, was facing extradition to the United States on bribery and racketeering charges.

After an artillery bombardment that lasted weeks, Russian forces have advanced into the city. The block-by-block fighting has ebbed and flowed, according to Ukrainian officials, and the precise number of Ukrainian fighters who remain and how much of the city they control is unclear.

The plant is a collection of long, low buildings occupying several blocks in the western part of the city, with two towering chimneys and several smaller ones. Chemicals are a staple of the country’s industrial output, and before the war, the plant was a major producer of ammonia, urea and ammonium nitrate.

Ukrainian officials release daily images of the latest damage to the shattered city. Most civilians have already left.
For those holding out, resupply of ammunition, food, water and medical supplies is crucial. After Mariupol fell in early May, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine saluted the bravery of helicopter pilots who died trying to resupply the steel works. In the case of Sievierodonetsk, bridges connecting the city of Lysyschansk on the western bank of the river had been crucial for resupply and evacuation, but Ukrainian officials on Tuesday said the last bridge had been destroyed.

“Russian forces are continuing to fight for control of the Azot industrial plant and have destroyed all bridges between Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, likely to isolate the remaining Ukrainian defenders within the city from critical lines of communication,” the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said a report on Wednesday.

this article by Matthew Mpoke Bigg, who is a correspondent covering international news. He previously worked as a reporter, editor and bureau chief for Reuters and did postings in Nairobi, Abidjan, Atlanta, Jakarta and Accra.

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From stocks to bonds and currencies, the coronavirus outbreak is rocking all corners of financial markets. For oil producers, the pain has been particularly acute. With demand dissipating, oil has plunged into a bear market, putting pressure on OPEC to step in and attempt to stabilize prices. But as the coronavirus continues to spread around the world can the cartel really play the savior?

That’s the question this week, as OPEC members and allied producers gather in Vienna for meetings on Thursday and Friday. The backdrop: Brent crude futures, the global benchmark, finished Friday at $50.52 per barrel, down 13.6% for the week. US oil was trading at $44.76, a 16.2% weekly decline. Prices haven’t been that low since late 2018.Why OPEC needs to act: The economies of some OPEC members are reliant on crude production, and the coronavirus has sharply reduced demand for products such as gasoline and jet fuel. To keep prices from dropping further, OPEC may turn to what has become its preferred strategy in recent years: coordinated production cuts.The Financial Times has reported that Saudi Arabia is pushing for a cut in production of 1 million barrels per day, much more than first expected. The kingdom would shoulder the brunt of the reduction, while Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Russia would split the rest, according to the FT. Russia is not a member of OPEC, but it has coordinated production levels with the cartel in recent years.Giovanni Staunovo, an analyst at UBS, thinks that may not be enough to alter oil’s trajectory in the near term. “I’m not sure this [would be] sufficient to change the negative market sentiment,” he told me. “What is cheap can get cheaper.”Bright spot: Staunovo points out that oil prices aren’t sustainable for long at their current level. Within six months and a year, lower business investment across a struggling industry will restrict supply, helping to prop up prices, he said. Plus, bargain crude will eventually stimulate demand.Oswald Clint, an analyst at Bernstein, agrees that prices will need to push higher before long. He thinks that an OPEC cut of 1 million barrels per day would be sufficiently supportive, especially given falling oil production in countries like Norway that predated the coronavirus outbreak.But both Staunovo and Clint agree that oil markets need a bailout from OPEC — and soon.

Stocks just had a brutal week. The next one may not be easier

Global stocks have fallen for seven trading sessions in a row, lodging their worst week since the 2008 financial crisis and putting investors on edge as the novel coronavirus continues to spread outside China.What’s happening: Stocks plunged and financial conditions tightened as traders woke up to the risks that the virus poses to global economic growth and corporate earnings, with cases now present in more than 50 countries and territories. The Dow finished the week down 12.4%, while the S&P 500 slid 11.5%.US stocks recovered some losses in the late hours of trading on Friday after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell put out a rare statement. “The fundamentals of the US economy remain strong,” he said, while acknowledging that the coronavirus “poses evolving risks to economic activity.” The central bank, Powell said, will “act as appropriate to support the economy.”To investors, the message was loud and clear: expect the Fed to cut interest rates when it meets in March. According to CME Group’s FedWatch tool, 100% of investors now predict a rate cut in March — with nearly 95% forecasting that the Fed will lower rates by a decisive 50 basis points.Will that reassurance be enough to help markets stabilize this week? It’s hard to say. After years of persistently low interest rates, investors are worried that central banks lack sufficient ammunition to stave off a crisis.”An interest rate cut in this environment will arguably do little to affect real economic activity,” Morgan Stanley economist Ellen Zentner told clients Friday.And the market remains driven by news of how the outbreak is moving around the world, as well as how it’s hitting businesses and economies. On Saturday, China said that factory activity in February hit the weakest level on record, and the first person died from the coronavirus in the United States.Justin Onuekwusi, a fund manager at Legal & General Investment Management, told me that his team — which manages $84 billion in retail multi-asset funds — has reduced its exposure to stocks and the Korean won.”We don’t feel the market has certainty on this,” he said. “The impact on Chinese growth and the rest of the world is potentially quite huge.”

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Crude oil prices went up where they left off last week. The U.S. oil price benchmark, WTI, was up around 2% to more than $57 a barrel. That caused several industry stocks soaring.

Oil prices approached a six-week high on Monday as investors have started growing a bit more optimistic about the sector’s prospects. Fueling today’s bullishness was rising hope that the U.S. and China will resolve their trade dispute, which has been weighing on oil demand.

Obviously any hope for the trade war to be ended or back to more normal conditions, the fears of a world economy recession will be less (being more conservative, we can say it will be postponed!)

In addition to that, Saudi Arabia continues to make progress on the initial public offering of its national oil company, suggesting that investors are warming up to the idea of buying shares.

The World’s Largest Oil Company Is Officially offering its stock to the public and this will impact the world’s energy market in different ways.

Aramco has entered the final stage of preparations for its much-anticipated initial public offering, by officially announcing it would list shares on the local Tadawul exchange.

“Today is the right opportunity for new investors to reap the benefits of Aramco’s ability to achieve value, and boost it on the long-term,” the chairman of Aramco, Yasir al-Rumayyan told a news conference as quoted by Reuters.

While the news is certainly welcome after months of uncertainty, the company has been shy on details. In the announcement, there was no word on the actual date of the float, the number of shares that will be offered on Tadawul, or the price.

But not all the news are positive in the Energy-sphere. There are still challenges to the sustainability of world peace and progress of the markets. issues like a probable economy crisis and recession, possibility of war in several geographical

A Wave Of Unprofitable Oil Is About To Hit The Market. The massive wave of investment that went into offshore oil projects earlier this decade may produce a lot of oil, but profits might not materialize.

Earlier this decade, between 2010 and 2014, oil prices traded at levels that are hard to imagine today, often rising above $100 per barrel. That led to huge wave of spending on costly, often high-risk oil projects, many of which were offshore in deepwater or ultra-deepwater.

As the Energy and Oil market shapes mostly in Persian Gulf area, it is important to mention Iran’s conditions and statements. Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh was quoted as saying on Monday that he expects further production cuts to be agreed at the next meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in December.

“We expect the decline in oil production to increase further, which means that we will see a further decrease by OPEC to the market,” Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency quoted Zanganeh as saying when asked about the next OPEC meeting.

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There are several definitions and explanations for an economy bubble and the probability of a crisis coming. I’d like to refer the one I feel confident with, from the book “FINANCIAL MARKET HISTORY” by David Chambers and Elroy Dimson, published by University of Cambridge, Judge Business School.

They refer to bubbles and crisis as “Booms and Crashes” as they explain:

a bubble is defined as a boom followed by a crash. A boom is a large, rapid increase in stock prices. A crash is a large, rapid decline in market prices.

What is large? What is rapid? 

They define booms in two ways:

(1) a single year in which a market value (or cumulative return) increased by at least 100%,

and

(2) a period of three years over which the market increased by 100%.

This second definition is chosen so as to include the famous US bubbles of the 1920s and 1990s. 

And a bubble is also defined in two ways:

(1) a drop of at least 50% in the following year,

and

(2) a drop of at least 50% over the next five years. There are other ways to use price dynamics to define a bubble.

So how does Dow Jones look like right now?

if you look at the chart of DJI in this post, you can notice the obvious uptrend in one and three years time have had enough corrections which results in less than 100% rise in each period. So this can not be considered a bubble (according the given definition, there might be other definitions and theories with different conclusions)

Resources

1. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EDJI/chart/
2. https://www.publish0x.com/honarparvar/stock-market-bubble-and-crisis-definition-and-todays-analysi-xpxenx

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Oil tanker war is not over

Iranian Oil Tanker is the latest of the tanker wars, which was hit by missiles. The blasts follows a series of attacks on tankers belonging to Saudi Arabia and its allies and on Saudi oil facilities which have been blamed on Iran.

Iran has not said who it believes is responsible for the attack on its tanker, though Riyadh will be top of its list of suspects.  

OPEC supply decisions

Producer club OPEC hinted at making deeper cuts in supply while optimism was revived over talks between the United States and China to end their trade war.

Beyond OPEC, trade talks between the United States and China also remained on the market’s radar as the world’s top two economies seek to resolve a more-than-a-year-long trade row that has slowed global economic growth and curbed fuel consumption.

Persian Gulf remains insecure and fragile

There are many signs for such conclusion and among them, the latest United States decision to deploy additional boots on the ground to Saudi Arabia, as well as a missile defense system, in order to shore up security in the country after it suffered an unprecedented attack on its oil infrastructure.

Venezuela stays dilute and off the market

Trafigura, Equinor, Exxon, and Unipec are among the companies that are increasingly turning their backs on Venezuelan oil contracts, along with vessel operators, all too aware of the consequences of violating U.S. sanctions against Venezuela.

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The conference aims to bring together leading industry players from the world’s fastest growing bitumen markets in the region, says Petrosil authority, the organizer of the event.

You can meet with key representatives from refineries, regional governments and bitumen end-users and take part in shaping the future of the bitumen and asphalt market at this Bitumen and Asphalt conference.

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