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RJ
Rory Johnston
Commodity Context
First call on the ledger
No calls filed yet. Quotes in curly quotation marks are verbatim; everything
else is a labeled paraphrase. Every call links its original source. Before you trust the call, check the record.
Where they stand
Views on the record but not scoreable bets: no single number and deadline to grade. Shown in their exact words, never scored.
The episode's headline finding
“I did not expect that China would cut crude oil imports by 5 million barrels a day, between February and June. That is our gargantuan swing. That alone absorbed roughly half to two thirds of the Asian crude oil deficit alone.”
So the import cut is not demand destruction, he argues; likely invisible stock releases
“And yet we have seen no evidence of a reduction in domestic mobility in China. Flights are fine, road congestion's fine, truck transits are fine.”
“China is now arguably the single is taking the spot of the United States and even Saudi Arabia as the kind of key swing balance in the global oil market”
Managed-money net positioning at its low of the year, he says
“when we got down to like low 70s on Brent that was probably at least 10 bucks was just that net short kind of weighing down on the front contract in particular. Now I expect that to reverse.”
His short-covering rally call
“So I think we're going to have this big J flip on the other side that you always need a fundamental trigger we didn't know what it was going to be but now it seems like we might get a re closure the Strait of Hormuz and a rebar a reentry of China to the crude oil market and on water all at the same time which is kind of the ultimate trigger for this short covering event that was bound to happen eventually”
On the June 17 MOU; 'MEU' is the tape's rendering of MOU
“the problem you fundamentally is it's unstable Trump kind of had one understanding of the MEU Iran clearly had another”
What he heard across the Iranian political spectrum
“they all say the straight of Hormuz is never going back to the status quo of where it was before the war”
A rare on-record mea culpa on his own prior odds
“I would say the likelihood of Hormuz being closed was like less than 1%, obviously, that turned out to be wrong this year.”
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