Simon Watkins is a former senior FX trader and salesman, financial journalist, and best-selling author. He was Head of Forex Institutional Sales and Trading for Credit Lyonnais, and later Director of Forex at Bank of Montreal. He was then Head of Weekly Publications and Chief Writer for Business Monitor International, Head of Fuel Oil Products for Platts, and Global Managing Editor of Research for Renaissance Capital in Moscow. He has written extensively on oil and gas, Forex, equities, bonds, economics and geopolitics for many leading publications, and has worked as a geopolitical risk consultant for a number of major hedge funds in London, Moscow, and Dubai. In addition, he has authored five books on finance, oil, and financial markets trading published by ADVFN and available on Amazon, Apple, and Kobo.
Nineteen new cooperation agreements in the areas of oil gas, infrastructure, and finance have been signed in recent days between Iran and Russia, a senior…
A key reason why oil prices have remained relatively subdued despite the ongoing Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars is that Iran has been producing much more…
Seasoned watchers of Iraq’s oil and gas sector have come to regard its perennial calls for new measures to increase its gas production with the…
It is not surprising that profits in 2023 at Saudi Arabia’s flagship company Saudi Aramco were lower than in 2022. After all, the average price…
Following the huge reduction in Russian pipelined gas to Europe following 24 February 2022’s invasion of Ukraine, liquefied natural gas (LNG) has become the swing…
China’s stunning economic growth was almost single-handedly responsible for the commodities supercycle from the late 1990s to the onset of the 2014-2016 Oil Price War,…
According to Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman last week, an extra 15 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas deposits has been proven…
A series of legal rulings by Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court (FSC) on 21 February underlined that the planned New Oil Law being worked on by…
The long-awaited US$8.5 billion 230,000-barrels per day (bpd) Duqm Refinery Project (DRP) – and its ancillary projects (costing another US$10 billion or so) – were…
There is no practical impediment to Iraq becoming a world-leading exporter of petrochemicals, given its huge oil and gas resources. It holds an estimated 145…
From the moment the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the ‘nuclear deal’ (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) with Iran on 8 May 2018, it has…
Last week’s attempt by the U.S.’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives to unblock the stoppage on approvals of permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) looks…
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, liquefied natural gas (LNG) has become the world’s key emergency energy supply. It does not require the…
Russian gas giant Gazprom has been awarded the development contract for the supergiant Nasiriyah oil field in Iraq’s strategic southern eastern region close to the…
Perhaps no subject in the complex world of global oil involves so many intricate moving parts as the extraordinary relationship between the Federal Government of…
Until a few days ago, two key factors had kept oil prices down since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War on 7 October 2023. The…
China is over the halfway mark in completing its strategically vital oil project in the critical Iraqi energy hub of Nasiriyah, at the heart of…
Perhaps the single most important factor in NATO’s united stand against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the quick substitution of the cheap and plentiful Russian…
This year will see a major push by Russia to ensure that the Northern Sea Route (NSR), which is vital for shipping minerals, oil, and…
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, gave his official approval on 18 January to a new 20-year comprehensive cooperation deal between the Islamic Republic of Iran…