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.
Russia regards its Arctic oil and gas development in the same way that the U.S. saw its shale oil and gas sector around 20 years…
Iran last week revealed a huge new gas deposit located in the Iranian sector of the Caspian Sea. The ‘Chalous’ structure is to be developed…
As highlighted repeatedly by OilPrice.com there are two extremely powerful reasons why the oil price has been effectively capped around US$75-80 per barrel of Brent…
The recent transfer of IQD200 billion (US$137 million) from the Federal Government of Iraq (FGI) in Baghdad to the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan’s government (KRG)…
There was always something that did not look quite right about Lukoil’s recent announcement that it was going to withdraw from Iraq’s huge West Qurna…
Even more so than Iran, Iraq remains the greatest relatively underdeveloped oil (and gas) frontier in the Middle East. It is little wonder, then, that…
Iran has spent a lot of its time, money, and lives of its direct and proxy military forces in building up its influence across the…
Iran’s Jask oil terminal is now fully set to start loading vast quantities of crude to any major buyer in the world via the Gulf…
A series of deals between China and Iraq in the run-up to this week’s visit of Iraq President Mustafa al-Kadhimi to Washington, including the latest…
The UAE’s awarding last week of a slew of huge drilling contracts aimed at increasing its crude oil output capacity from around 4 million barrels…
Figures released last week show that China’s crude oil imports in the first half of 2021 declined for the first time in eight years. China…
Someone in the White House seems to have stumbled upon an atlas, seen where Oman is located, and worked out how crucial it is in…
The transformation of Saudi Arabia’s flagship asset, Aramco, from perpetual cash-generation machine into a debt-laden giant is set to pick up pace in the coming…
In keeping with its geographical position directly between Saudi Arabia on its west and Iran on its east, Qatar’s geopolitical positioning is a tricky thing…
A long-delayed deal between Saudi Arabia’s flagship oil company, Saudi Aramco, and Indian conglomerate, Reliance Industries, looks closer to going ahead following the recent appointment…
At June’s G7 meeting, U.S. President, Joe Biden, received the backing of the world’s seven largest advanced economies (comprised of the U.S., the U.K., Germany,…
A number of false assumptions have continued to cloud the coverage of the ongoing re-negotiation between the U.S. and Iran of a new iteration of…
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is the key Arab state at the centre of the U.S.’s Middle East pushback against increasing Chinese and Russian influence…
For decades, the true numbers relating to Saudi Arabia’s level of crude oil reserves and production have been a subject of much debate and confusion,…
News last week that U.K. oil super-major, BP, is working on a plan to spin off its operations in Iraq’s supergiant Rumaila oil field into…