SPR: Trade It to Save It ft. Arnab Datta (Employ America)

Gotcha, gotcha.

Okay.

So...

With that background, what's the current status of the SPR? It seems like we have a few different ways to look at this, both sort of what's happening in markets, as you said, at the top, also what's happening geopolitically, and then also what's happening physically with the SPR.

I wonder if we could take a look at all three of those buckets here.

Yeah, sure.

I just want to make sure I get these.

So physical markets and geopolitically.

So let me start with the markets perspective.

So we had coming into February a market that was oversupplied in glut.

You saw prices had come down considerably over the past couple of years.

And generally, the consensus was that the next year was going to be a period of lower prices and oversupply.

And then the hormones crisis opened up and we had the biggest supply shock in history.

And it quickly turned into what we would call a shortage.

And you saw prices in that March, February, March, April, late February, March, April period.

get quite high.

So, you know, go above a hundred bucks a barrel.

The physically delivered contracts hit $140 a barrel, real kind of prices in Asia.

And that was where we were.

And then there was a joint 400 million barrel release by the IEA.

We were 172 million barrels released as part of that.

That was announced near the end of March, in March.

And so that was kind of the market response.

You also saw a number of different market factors that brought prices down.

So you had these releases.