Oil markets have had yet another confusing week, this time not just because of the coronavirus and all the media attention that has garnered. But this week, disparate crude oil inventory data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and American Petroleum Institute (API) left traders wondering which set of inventory change data–which is supposed to be representative of the balance between supply and demand–was “the right data”. History suggests that markets will move after hours on Tuesday in response to whatever data the API dishes out. But because inventory moves are almost always priced into the market before the data release, the biggest price moves in response to the data release is not when inventories have moved up or down in a significant fashion, rather, it is when the data released differs significantly from what analysts had predicted. Eighteen hours later, the markets look toward the EIA data. The […]