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.
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…
There are two key reasons why China, Russia, and the U.S. have long been scrambling to secure control over Iraq’s gas sector, and these are…
The World Bank said at the end of October that a ‘large disruption’ in the global supply of crude oil – which it equated to…
Iran and Iraq last week agreed to create a series of executive committees aimed at increasing cooperation in all areas of the energy sector and…
The official handover of the lead operator role on one of the world’s biggest oil fields – West Qurna 1 – from the U.S.’s ExxonMobil…
Given that Libya still has 48 billion barrels of proved crude oil reserves – the largest in Africa – recent comments from National Oil Corporation…
The last couple of years have seen a series of extraordinary events, most notably the invasion of Ukraine by Russia on 24 February 2022 and…
Iraq has potentially huge gas reserves but its failure so far to properly develop them has led to three key problems for itself and the…
The U.S. and its key allies on the West and the East continue to tighten the noose around Russian exports of oil and gas and…
Given the festive time of year, it is perhaps fitting that senior Iraqi politicians are again pushing for the full activation of the ‘Iraq-China Framework…
The rise in the benchmark Brent oil price from just over US$72 per barrel (pb) to above US$80pb in a week highlights that the risk…
Events often have a way of highlighting the circular nature of time rather than its linearity. An extraordinarily notable recent example of this was this…
Qatar remains by far the biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the Middle East, and one of the top three in the world,…
Since the mid-1990s, China has been the key global buyer of multiple commodities needed to power its economic growth. The purpose of this growth was…
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the race has been on to secure as much of the world’s regular liquefied natural gas…