Tepid Tuesday Wrap-Up

Well that was a bit disappointment.

We got leadership from the Russell and the Nasdaq so all is certainly not lost but it would have been nice if we could have had a positive close across the board:

There was a nice pullback in oil but it was also the expiration day for the June contract so we take it with a pillar of salt until we see how tomorrow’s inventory day shakes out.  The July contract dropped as much as the June contract as traders decided they didn’t need another 20M barrels leaving the final barrel count for June delivery at just 25M barrels after starting the period with 330M barrels on order.  July has a whopping 357M open barrels and there’s already 102M barrels on tap for August and 67M for back to school time.

Knocking down the barrel count to 25M virtually guarantees a "shortage" in inventory since the traders just cancelled delivery of 305M barrels so remember that when the weather girl tells you how tight supplies are in this country as they had the orders in their hands to accept 294Mb for June delivery at $61.47 per barrel on May 7th.  I CAN’T WAIT FOR THE CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY ON THIS ONE!

[Please send this to every congressperson you can find, I’m keeping it short so as not to lose their attention but let’s put this issue on the front burner as this month was one of the most blatant examples of manipulation in the energy markets we’ve seen in quite some time (and we do watch!).]

Criminal Narrators Boosting Crude are about to tell you that crude inventories fell 1M, perhaps 2M barrels a week in the month of June but it all starts right here where NYMEX energy traders REFUSE TO ACCEPT DELIVERY of even the 40M barrels that Cushing, OK can comfortably process in a month.  Today alone, 25,000 June oil contracts were traded 114,000 times as traders churn and churn these ridiculous orders in a national game of hot potato where the only losers are the American consumers.

After the NYMEX traders are done pumping up the price of barrels of oil they hand it off to the refiners who do everything but refine (fires, maintenance, leaks…) as they add another $40 (new record last week) to the price of a barrel of oil at the pump, hitting consumers up for a whopping $105 per barrel last week – and that’s wholesale!  When you pay $4 per gallon, keep in mind that there are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil, that’s another $63 of markup between the refiner and you so you can pay $168 for your barrel of refined crude!

Please, let’s start sending this information to people ahead of the Congressional hearings on energy – it doesn’t do any good to have hearings if no one asks the right questions…

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Today was another one of those days where we set our stops and the market just kept going up and up on us.  We made very few new plays as we’d like to see our break-outs confirmed but certainly there was nothing to complain about in today’s action: