RBOB gasoline closes at a 2-year high (and WTI tested down to a $45 handle) as all attention is focused on the duration and impact of the storm (and how long refineries will be closed). Tonight's API data should not be market-moving since it relates to data from before Harvey but showed a big crude draw and modest (surprising) gasoline build once again.
API
Authored by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist blog,
Remember last November when it seemed like everyone was a US dollar bull?
Either they thought Trump would usher in the next Reaganesque US economic free market nirvana, or they were convinced there was this massive US dollar emerging markets short position from the years of USD debt issuance.
Nothing better illustrates the one sided nature of US dollar sentiment than the early December 2016 issue of The Economist.
Hurricane Harvey's historic flooding in Texas is set to wreak havoc on the auto industry and its insurers with analysts now predicting the storm could damage more vehicles than Hurricane Katrina. In August 2005, Katrina wiped out some 500,000-600,000 vehicles but William Armstrong of CL King warns that Houston has about 5x more people than New Orleans did at the time.
On Monday, China’s government and president Xi blessed the merger between the country's top coal miner, Shenhua Group and China Guodian Group, one of the country’s top five state power producers, in a deal that will create the world’s largest power company, worth 1.8 trillion yuan, or $278 billion. Putting the sheer size of the two merged behemoths in context, the resulting entity will be the world’s second-biggest company by revenue and largest by installed capacity.
According to the latest Conference Board survey, 80% of Americans surveyed believe that stock prices will not be lower in the next 12 months. The last time the nation was so convinced of the market's 'permanently high plateau' was in the fall of 2007, as the S&P topped...
Only 20% of Americans believe stocks will fall in the next 12 months - that is the lowest number since mid-2017
What happened next was not pretty (oh and in 1999/2000...)
And don't forget that speculators have never been more net long Dow futures...