Light Sweet Crude Oil Reports

I've been trading oil on and off for 4 years now. One thing I've learned is that oil moves based on numbers from the following weekly reports:

• The American Petroleum Institute (API) reports on Tuesday 4:30 PM EST. The API is a U.S. trade association for the oil and natural gas industry. Their reports feature inventories of crude oil and oil-derived products such as gasoline and fuel oil. Reports are only available via purchase or through Thomson Reuters. However, less than 5 minutes after the report, you can typically find the key numbers in the $CL_F channel on StockTwits. A typical post might look like this:

Crude: -2.62MM, Exp. +3.25MM
Gasoline -1.69MM
Distillate: -2.32MM
Cushing: +905K
Production: 10.407MMbpd, +26kbpd

• The Energy Information Administration (EIA) weekly petroleum status report on Wednesday at 10:30 AM EST. The EIA is a part of the US Department of Energy. Anyone can access the report at the EIA site.
• The Baker Hughes rig count report on Friday at 1:00 PM EST. Baker Hughes is a GE company. Anyone can access the rig count report on the Baker Hughes site.

I'll drill into these reports in future posts.

Crude oil futures trading hours (from the zacks.com website)

Energy futures contracts are traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group.

• Open: Sunday at 6:00 PM EST.
• Close: Friday at 5:15 PM EST.
• Pit trading runs Monday through Friday 9 AM - 2:30 PM EST.
• Trading stops every weekday from 5:15 to 6 PM EST.

Martin Kronicle offers training for traders. I can't speak for their classes, but I listened to one of their podcasts featuring Brynne Kelly, an energy analyst: What the CL and NG contracts actually mean. She explains how she analyses the oil and gas markets and offers a PDF summary as well.

Thanks for reading! I'll update this blog daily with what I've learned from trading.