oil

If asking traders where stocks and oil would be trading one day after a weekend in which the Doha OPEC meeting resulted in a spectacular failure, few if any would have said the S&P would be over 2,100, WTI would be back over $40 and the VIX would be about to drop to 12 and yet that is precisely where the the S&P500 is set to open today, hitting Goldman's year end target 8 months early, and oblivious of the latest batch of poor earnings news, this time from Intel and Netflix, both of which are sharply down overnight.

My 15 year old son and I went to the NY Hedge Fund Roundtable event on the energy sector at the Penn Club last week. It's good to have your children see you perform. The discussion surrounded the price of oil, LNG and the impact Elon Musk is having on the oil industry.

Stephen Schork of the Schork report was the standout personality of the panel (buyside vs sellside panelists) basically echoing what yours truly has been telling you.

The ridiculous headline risk that is whipsawing oil showed up this morning once again. WTI slide as much as $41.26 earlier on news that Iran's Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh wouldn't be attending the April 17 meetings in Doha, however just moments later it was reported that Iran's OPEC Governor Kaempour will be attending and losses were largely erased.

First it was the Saudis; then Russia announced another month of record oil production.

And now it is Iraq's turn. According to the state-run Oil Marketing Co., Iraq increased crude output to a record level in March, ahead of the long-awaited April 17 meeting in Qatar where OPEC members and other producers may or may not (they won't) agree to cap production to curb a global glut.

In recent weeks, oil traditionally jumped following DOE data that showed inventory builds because, well, gasoline and distillate inventories had gone down. Today, oil jumped...