🛢 “Why aren’t oil prices higher?” “How can the oil market be so complacent?”

Oil prices almost always trade to extremes. Right before it does, it always gets “obvious” from a fundamental setup standpoint.

I remember a great conversation I had with Nelson Wu of Open Square Capital about the oil market being analogous to toilet paper. You don’t realize how badly you need it until you run out of it.

Oil prices trade on the margin. As long as there are onshore inventories to draw from, traders don’t panic. It’s when you run low on onshore inventories that panic starts to set in.

Goldman published an update on Thursday that basically captured the storage math phenomenon that we are seeing:

Global visible total oil inventories remain bloated relative to historical standards. If, for example, we had started the conflict with global oil inventories at the 2025 lows, WTI and Brent would already be above $200/bbl.

The ~1.4 billion bbl cushion at the start of 2026 is what gave the US time to navigate the Iranian conflict without the oil market blowing up. It was also the same reason why at the beginning of the conflict, I wrote a piece titled, “Why Aren’t Oil Prices At $100?”

But fast forwarding 6-weeks later, the facts have changed. The conflict is ongoing, and that onshore cushion you are seeing in storage is nothing but a mirage. Even if the conflict ends this very second and everything returns to normal, that oil inventory is gone.

Vanished. No more.

In essence, the oil market really should be pricing forward balances as if we are already near 7.6 billion bbls, but it’s not, and this creates the biggest mispricing trade since the COVID lockdown (short oil) trade.

Oil traders, the physical guys, lack both the means and capabilities to drive financial prices higher. Financial markets are exponentially larger than the physical side, but there’s one quirk: expiry.

As the futures market approaches expiry, people who continue to hold the contracts are obligated to deliver the goods (literally). This mechanism will be tested first at the May WTI expiry, where the physical market is already quoted at a +$20 premium to financial prices. It will be tested again in the Brent expiry at the end of the month.

What will happen is that as we get closer to the expiry, market participants who are short have to cover because there’s no way in hell they can deliver the goods physically.

We are literally going to run out of available commercial crude storage. This will force the prompt month higher, which will suck in financial flows into the June contracts. This inflection point will shock market participants awake.

This is one of the main reasons why I’ve remained so calm over the past few weeks. The math is what it is. The Trump administration can jawbone oil prices all they want. Axios can publish whatever headlines it wants, but the reality will be swift and vicious. If you do not have the means to deliver the goods, you have to cover.

🔗 HFI Research