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Oil rises on Nigerian strike

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After yesterday's one day sell off in oil, prices have once again moved to the upside in today's trading. The main reason for the upward move today comes from Nigeria, where a strike has created supply fears and pushed oil back up over $69 a barrel.

We discussed on Monday that things in Nigeria have been tense for a while, and that the country's oil unions were planning to start a strike yesterday in reaction to increases in automobile fuel prices by the government. The strike got under way yesterday and has the potential to halt close to 2 million barrels a day from the country.

With all of the other upward pressure on oil these days, a 2 million barrel a day cut from Nigeria is definitely going to force prices higher. As we started out this week it looked as though seeing prices trading above $70 by the weekend was pretty much a no brainer, then yesterday's rise in inventories helped bring prices down and had many analysts out there starting to claim that oil was in danger of topping out. I don't agree with that idea just yet and stated yesterday that I thought it was going to be a quick pullback and then we would get back into the current rally. With today's move, it's looking much more likely that we'll see prices cross through the psychological $70 barrier tomorrow.


Earlier today prices were able to head all the way up to $69.88 but have since fallen back down a bit. Currently I am seeing the front running futures (Aug '07) trading up $0.28 to $69.14. Most of our readers know that for the past week or so I have been writing a lot about the bullish factors behind the recent move in oil, and all of those factors are still in place, and now with the effect of the Nigerian strike starting to be realized by the market I think we still have a ways to go before oil tops out this summer. I don't know if I am willing to predict $80 oil like we saw last summer, but I am standing behind my forecast of oil heading towards $75 over the next couple of weeks.

For a little more on some of the other reasons why oil has been trading so strongly lately, read this oil post l I wrote last week about the key factors contributing to this current price spike.

A current graph of oil
Symbol Lookup
IndexesChangePrice
DJIA-223.328,280.74
NASDAQ-49.201,796.52
S&P 500-26.91896.42

Last updated: July 04, 2009: 10:14 AM

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