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.
Because crude oil is still the lifeblood of any well-functioning economy and because the infrastructure surrounding it is so multi-faceted – including extensive pipelines running…
Russian President, Vladimir Putin, arrived in Tehran last week for the second time since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February. Just before…
If ever there had been a time when crude oil was going to reach the US$200-plus per barrel (pb) levels posted in clickbait headlines or…
For a moment last week, it seemed that Libya might be snapping back into some version of itself more approaching normalcy than has been evident…
Up until Russia invaded Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022, it was accepted wisdom that China would not overtly challenge the U.S.’s authority across…
A principal strategy being used by Iran to pressure the U.S. into dropping the conditions required for a new iteration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan…
For many years now, Saudi Arabia has been wildly exaggerating every metric connected to its oil business, from how much crude it can produce to…
G7 leaders have been discussing the prospect of reviving the Iran nuclear talks, a French presidency official said last week and, given continuing high oil…
Ever since China gave Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) the opportunity to save face after his many unsuccessful attempts to float Saudi Aramco…
Three events occurred in the last week or so involving either Iran or Iraq separately, or both together, that put Russia back front and centre…
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 swathe of…
Following on from the recent signing by Qatar of a declaration of intent on energy cooperation with Germany aimed at becoming its key supplier of…
The long-running dispute over how oil flows are handled in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq – administered by its government (the KRG,…
The economic pain for many countries being caused by still-high crude oil (and gas) prices may be exacerbated by another extensive series of blockades of…
The ban by the European Union (E.U.) on Russian oil imports by sea, in the first instance, is likely to affect around 75 percent of…
Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, and his Saudi counterpart, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, met at length last week in Riyadh after which they released statements…
Russian Deputy Prime Minister, Alexander Novak, headed a high-level delegation to Iran last week, with the Kremlin-orchestrated invasion of Ukraine still in full swing. According…
Long before the re-emergence of the ‘Pan-Arab’ ideology now increasingly evident among several leading Middle Eastern countries, Qatar had sought to go its own way,…
Iraq’s Oil Minister, Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar, last week stated that the country aims to increase its crude oil production to 6 million barrels per day (bpd)…
The huge discrepancy between China’s massive economic growth and its minimal oil and gas reserves made it the big global backstop bid for crude oil…