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 U.S. and Iran have been engaged in on-off talks about the resuscitation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – the ‘nuclear deal’…
The starting point for all sound intelligence analysis of a particular action is to identify who gains from it and what it is that they…
Central to the expansion of Chinese and Russian influence via Iran into the space in the Middle East vacated by the U.S. since former U.S.…
In the same way that the U.S.’s global hydrocarbons power has been turbo-boosted by the rise of its shale energy industry, which began with gas…
There are three key reasons why the development of a world-class petrochemicals (petchems) sector is vital to Iraq’s future. First, its heavy reliance on crude…
The Saudi government is indeed in advanced talks with several Chinese entities – sovereign wealth funds and oil companies – to sell a 1 per…
The China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec) last week signed a 25-year deal with Iraq’s Ministry of Oil that gives it a 49 per cent…
Given the ongoing imbalance between global oil supply and demand in the wake of the major waves of Covid-19 that hit the world last year,…
Iraq’s Oil Minister, Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar, announced last week that the country plans to increase its oil production capacity to 8 million barrels per day (bpd)…
Even before the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) ‘nuclear deal’ was agreed in 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 (U.S., U.K., France, China, Russia…
Three key developments were announced last week by the UAE in line with its role as a principal member of the U.S.’s new Middle East…
Official estimates are that Iraq’s proven reserves of conventional natural gas amount to at least 3.5 trillion cubic meters (tcm), or about 1.5 percent of…
Last week’s signing of a 10-year purchase and sales agreement by the China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec) and Qatar Petroleum (QP) for 2 million…
Despite a 44 percent drop in its 2020 profits, the Saudi Arabian government has instructed majority-state-owned Saudi Aramco to stick to the US$75 billion per…
Iraq remains the key cover through which Iran transports its oil to the rest of the world, as has been well-documented by OilPrice.com, so the…
After the first oil price war launched by the Saudis against the then-nascent U.S. shale sector in 2014, Washington took the view that the Kingdom…
China’s annual session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) last week set an annual economic growth target that – at ‘above 6 per cent’ -…
As highlighted in OilPrice.com just after the last major attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities on 14 September 2019, there are many positive aspects from…
Whether the Iranian leadership thinks that new U.S. President Joe Biden is set to go easier on the Islamic Republic or on China is unclear…
The world’s top liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter, Qatar, has long occupied a political position in the Middle East that has neither been decisively aligned…