Let's Take Another Look at the Crack Spread

• stevenplace
• February 15th, 2011

At the time of this post, we’re seeing $USO break down, while $OIH is still holding strong… what gives?

We’ve got a couple things going on with respect to oil market structure. I don’t have the full scope of the theme knocked down yet, but essentially there is a glut of supply coming into the Cushing, OK facility, and that’s the price of /CL futures. But if you look at the price action of Brent crude, it’s holding up pretty well.

So my guess is, there’s a big drop in the price of crude, but RBOB gas and heating oil are holding up. Don’t know what the crack spread is? Get the rundown here.

Let’s have a look at the chart:

It seems the spread after basing out all last year has really started to break out, and is getting a little parabolic. I don’t know whether this can be seen as a proxy for global growth, but if you look at a chart of some refiners you will see very similar price action.. $VLO and $WNR come to mind.

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Tickers: Crack spread, crude oil, uso, vlo, wnr

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