Simon Watkins is a former senior FX trader and salesman, financial journalist, and best-selling author. He was Head of Forex Institutional Sales and Trading for Credit Lyonnais, and later Director of Forex at Bank of Montreal. He was then Head of Weekly Publications and Chief Writer for Business Monitor International, Head of Fuel Oil Products for Platts, and Global Managing Editor of Research for Renaissance Capital in Moscow. He has written extensively on oil and gas, Forex, equities, bonds, economics and geopolitics for many leading publications, and has worked as a geopolitical risk consultant for a number of major hedge funds in London, Moscow, and Dubai. In addition, he has authored five books on finance, oil, and financial markets trading published by ADVFN and available on Amazon, Apple, and Kobo.
The last few days have seen the U.K.’s Shell and BP, Japan’s Mitsui, and France’s TotalEnergies each take a 10 percent stake in the huge…
From the mid-1990s to onset of Covid at the end of 2019, China almost singlehandedly drove the commodities supercycle, consisting of ever-increasing prices for the…
One of the largest Western investors in Egypt’s energy sector, Italy’s Eni, has announced that it is to drill new wells in the country’s flagship…
July 6 saw Masoud Pezeshkian announced as the new president of Iran, following the death in a helicopter crash of his predecessor Ebrahim Raisi on…
The signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) last week between Russian state gas giant Gazprom and the Iranian National Gas Company (NIGC) to begin…
Saudi Arabia may be the third largest producer of crude oil in the world, after the U.S. and Russia, but its gas output has struggled…
It is likely to be around 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week in Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital of Erbil, but few regional commentators will doubt that many…
Early June saw OPEC+ extend its 3.66 million barrels per day (bpd) of production cuts to the end of 2025. It also announced that it…
Russian oil companies are to undertake a slew of new investments to development Iran’s huge oil and gas reserves, according to recent comments from the…
The signing of a 20-year deal for the U.S.’s NextDecade Corporation to sell liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Saudi Arabia’s flagship company, Aramco, could have…
A series of high-level meetings took place last week between senior Iraqi and Chinese officials to finalize the details of the next phase of their…
In a joint communiqué on 4 February 2022, China and Russia stated that: “Friendship between the two States [China and Russia] has no limits, there…
The 13 August 2020 U.S.-brokered relationship normalisation deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) underlined how important the Emirate was to Washington at…
Many more questions than answers have been raised by last week’s sale of an additional US$11.2 billion of shares in Saudi Arabia’s flagship company Aramco.…
Although the U.S. and China are indirectly involved in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars, the conflict between the world’s two leading Western and Eastern…
The awarding last week of the exploration and production (E&P) contract for Iraq’s second biggest gas field to a Chinese consortium comprising two of its…
Ever since the U.S. formally ended its combat mission in Iraq on 9 December 2021, it and its key allies have been looking for a…
The death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on Sunday 19 May has reignited optimism among some that Iran’s stance towards the…
Two announcements made on consecutive days last week may have far-reaching consequences for the security of the Middle East and the West for years to…
Iraq remains crucial to China’s ongoing efforts to establish dominance over the Middle East for three main reasons, which is why the slew of new…