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.
Global oil supply from several OPEC countries in the Middle East, perhaps all of them, remains contingent on whether the Israel-Hamas War widens out, and…
Iran has long been desperate to create a permanent ‘land bridge’ from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea by which it could exponentially increase the scale…
In the last 50 years or so, it is difficult to think of a time when so many dangers from so many directions could each…
At the time Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. had few allies left in the Middle East, following a period of disengagement from the…
There have been calls on U.S. President Joe Biden to clamp down on lucrative oil and gas exports from Iran - widely believed to have…
Given the enormous ground that the U.S. literally and metaphorically lost in the Middle East in recent years, any strategy it attempted to regain some…
In what turned out to be extraordinary timing, October 3 saw a Western coalition of France’s TotalEnergies and Italy’s Eni, plus Qatar Energy, apply for…
There are three key determinants of how high oil prices will go from here. First, whether it is in the financial interests of the key…
Like the first cuckoo of spring, the annual autumn refrain from senior Iraqi oil officials that gas imports from Iran will cease soon has that…
The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) has revealed that the country has around US$50 billion in oil and gas and related projects now underway, with…
Since 25 March, hundreds of thousands of barrels per day of oil flows crucial to the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq (KRI) and important to…
With its vast oil and gas resources, there is no fundamental reason why Iraq cannot become a world-class producer of high-value petrochemicals. In the process,…
The deal announced on 11 September that saw five Americans released from prison in Iran has brought the quiet ongoing discussions over a new, watered-down…
From the moment on 24 February 2022 when Russian troops first moved into Ukraine, liquefied natural gas (LNG) became the key swing energy resource without…
The decisions last week by Saudi Arabia to continue its 1 million barrel per day (bpd) production cut to the end of this year and…
Piece by piece, China continues to build alternatives to each of the key building blocks of the West’s world order, including - crucially - a…
As the world’s largest annual gross crude oil importer in the world since 2017, and before that as the key driver of the broader commodities…
Oman has an importance to China and Iran that goes way beyond its relatively small oil and gas reserves (only around five billion barrels of…
Despite multi-layered international sanctions on Russia following its 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin’s ‘special energy project’ – developing the country’s massive…
Iran’s South Pars gas field is one half of the world’s largest gas resource – the other being Qatar’s North Field – so any official…