E-piphany

Here is an interesting chart that might suggest flows into oil markets.

Or perhaps it suggests something else. But I put together the chart below (data sourced from Bloomberg) because it seemed to me as if recently crude oil – and other energy markets, but I am focusing on Crude – has been having a nice little spike in the middle of the morning. Often, these have seemed inexplicable to me; other times (like yesterday) there was ostensibly news but it was not immediately obvious that the news was oil-supportive.

This chart shows a composite trading day for June NYMEX Crude Oil futures for the last 20 days. You can see that it appears I am not imagining it: on average, Crude has been rallying about 30 cents per day, beginning about 9:00ET.

I thought this might be flattered by the DOE weekly release, which is at 10:30ET on Wednesdays. So I removed those days and the relationship is still clear (although it makes the rise from 3am to 9am look relatively more important).

I don’t know exactly what this means, but it has “felt” to the old trader in me that the market was tending to gap in that time frame and this seems to confirm the visceral sense. It doesn’t necessarily mean my other gut feeling, that this might represent systematic daily allocations – perhaps to energy or broad commodity ETFs? Or OTC products? Or both? – is correct, however.