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.
With Russia having lost much of its ability to function as a state sponsor of Iraq, Baghdad is looking again to the U.S. for support.…
Despite repeated pleas from the U.S. that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), under the de facto leadership of Saudi Arabia, should not…
The recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit saw China enhance its influence with several of the world’s leading players in the oil and gas sector.…
Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court (FSC) has invalidated the decision of Iraq’s government to establish the Iraqi National Oil Company (INOC) on the basis that several…
The ramping up of production from its hugely oil-rich West Karoun cluster of oil fields to at least 1 million barrels per day (bpd) remains…
As Europe heads into winter and sanctions remain in place on Russian gas and oil after its invasion of Ukraine, the de facto leader of…
Continued high gas prices in Europe in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February have prompted several major European oil and gas companies…
China stated two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine that “there is ‘no limit’ to how far Russian and Chinese friendship may go” and signed a slew of…
The long-mooted prospect of the end of the U.S. dollar’s hegemony in the global oil and gas markets took another step towards realisation last week…
The sharp drop in crude oil prices last week on news that China had extended a Covid-19 lockdown in Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern…
Given the centuries-long hatred between regional rivals, Iran and Saudi Arabia, last week’s comments by Iran’s President, Ebrahim Raisi, that there have been five rounds…
Along with the (recently achieved) completion of the crucial Goreh-Jask pipeline oil export route, the (ongoing) ramping up of production from its hugely oil-rich West…
As a core element of the Russo-Iranian strategy to corner as much of the global gas market as possible in as short a time as…
Saudi Arabia’s threat last week to lead the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) into a concerted cutting of its collective crude oil production…
The US$40 billion memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed last month between Gazprom and the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) is a stepping stone to enabling…
India’s major shift in its oil purchasing pattern last month from Russia to Saudi Arabia has been interpreted by many global oil market participants as…
Iraq is planning to increase its crude oil production to phased targets of 5 to 8 million barrels per day (bpd) over time, according…
There are several reasons to be short crude oil currently – economic recession in the U.S. and looming recessions in Europe, ongoing lockdowns in China,…
The signing last week of a multi-pronged memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the Saudi Arabian Oil Company – formerly the Arabian American Oil Company -…
Any hopes held by international oil companies (IOCs) that the Baghdad-based Federal Government of Iraq (FGI) was just bluffing about blacklisting IOCs operating in the…