[pup55]

It's time for the new PO.com Oil Price Challenge. This annual contest, now in its FOURTH year, is always a source of fun, entertainment and street cred in the strange little world of PO.com that we have fabricated.....

First of all Thanks are in order to PeakOiler who diligently and brilliantly kept the running score for us last year...which was pretty unexciting, due to the forecasting brilliance of Oilfinder2 and SeaGypsy as well as Expat and PeakOiler himself, who have all been swapping out first place for the majority of the year. I believe OF2 is due particular recognition for being in first place for several months....

The rules this year will be the same as before.

All participants will guess the high, low, and close of the Nymex Futures Contract #1 price as posted by the EIA in this spreadsheet: One forecast per participant. You can change it if you want up until the deadline.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/xls/P ... T_S1_D.xls

Official results will be tabulated by me, hopefully PeakOiler will continue to help me from time to time, and the forecasts kept around for an entire year to to see who was the best. Please note that I am a terrible stenographer, typos are abundant, so keep track as we post the official entries to make sure we have your correct forecasts....We usually have it straightened out after a week or two. Periodic updates will be made to the standings just to see how we are doing, depending on whether or not there is a lead change or important movement in the price of WTI that might affect what we are doing.....

The winner of the contest will receive the love, respect and admiration of the PO.com community, which is priceless in and of itself. Nothing bad will happen to everyone else. Winners will be announced for who is closest to the high for the year, the low, and closest at the close, and of course the overall winner which will be a combination of all three, as we have done in the past.

Please try to have your guesses in by January 7th, which gives you a week after New Year.

Also, since we use this thread to capture predictions that are found in the media by real energy analysts and others, please feel free to post any that you might see. We have a lot of fun with this trying to expose the so-called "experts" by documenting their predictions.

Also, if you feel like it, and have some logic or other explanation as to how you arrived at your forecast, please feel free to embellish.

I will be the judge, and I am a laid back judge and rule changes may be announced as we go. Late entries will be received with reluctance, after deducting an appropriate amount of love and respect.

Although there is no prize awarded other than the aforementioned love and respect, side bets are encouraged. I particularly enjoyed the fact that a tasty maple syrupy side bet took place this year and would be delighted if more of these happened..because it brings us together as a community.... Also, past rankings in this thread may be used to settle flame wars and that kind of thing, so by all means, forecast with care because your whole social status in our little community might be affected by a bizarre forecast....then again it might be confirmed, I don't know.

Let the fun begin! Happy Holidays!

[SeaGypsy]

Increasing pressure on price controls is inevitable.
I feel there is a solid floor under $78; so I will put my low position as $77.70.
I think when (not if) the price goes over $100 the US will pull out the big guns of diplomacy, wipe the egg off their faces and push like hell for quota extension. There could easily be a lag in supply due to geo-political tensions; resulting in a spike near the $110 mark. Much over that and factories will be shutting down faster than new ones are opening, even in Chindia.
So my top I will put as $112.
Continued downward pressure on the dollar, growth in emerging economies will keep an overall upward trend exceeding core US inflation by near double.
Making allowances for 5% inflation, I expect an overall increase near 9% over calendar 2011 giving a close price of $97.
There are numerous possible black swan events which could blow my predictions out of the water; but my guess is more of the same as 2010.

[vtsnowedin]

My WAG!!
high 137 ,, low 77,, close 119

[dolanbaker]

My finger in the air!

High 124; Low, 82; close 115

[sparky]

.

Here we go ,

High 150 ..Low 80....Close 122

[obixman]

High - 135
low - 82.5
close - 130

I'm assuming that some sort of recovery happens, if we double dip or the recovery just stalls prices will be a bit lower....

[Ibon]

I took a drop of motor oil and placed it in a white soup bowl and held up the swirling rainbow colors to the light. Looking through a polarized lens the following numbers appeared like constellations: 14723

From that I get the following

High 147
Low 72
close 123

[eXpat]

Here we go
High - 140
low - 90
close - 120

[SteinarN]

I liked SeaGypsys reasoning. However there is a lot of unknowns here....
This year have been rather dull, nothing exciting have happened, no hurricanes, no large geopolitical turmoil, production still seems to keep up with demand.

I think OPEC have enough spare capacity to bring online next year so a modest increase in price.
So therefore...
High: 112
Low: 79
End: 102

[TheDude]

I like Ibon's method. Something auguries worked, you know. Mmm, add "live chicken" to shopping list. Oh wait, forgot that I drink tea...

Can I be completely vague?

High: A lot.
Low: Not so much.
Close: Some where in the middle. Or not.



There's that number again - ca. $112. Huh! DC didn't really go apecrap last time we passed $100/bbl, though. As I recall our brave POTUS just went begging hat in hand while poetasters on CNBC ruminated about it all. Current POTUS isn't much of a boatrocker so don't expect fireworks - Congress will be all a twitter of course. And the frequency between price spikes will be wholly unprecedented. Examining past price profiles I'm really curious what was going on back then. From Feb '81 high of $36.93 price had only dropped to 75.71% 31 months later - which is the equivalent of the Dec 2010 price compared to the June '08 high. Using a tentative FOB price of $88.33 for Dec that's only 68.31% of the June 2008 price of $123.34. This difference between the two patterns is narrowing but has been stuck at ca. 17% for the last few months, which doesn't amount to much - following that old pattern we'd have a Dec 2010 price of $93.38. Followed by about a year and a half of the exact same price...talk about dull.

Why didn't the price go through the floor then? Huge collapse in demand, and all this new oil on the market. It should have been measured in the cents. Why are we so blessed now? Traders overshot the mark? Decarbonized economy? Someone in the third world is being shafted?

Megaprojects never really went through the ceiling like they should have this year, and we hear of shortfalls in expected output from big KSA fields. That leaves what was truly shut in, which for OPEC is ostensibly about 1.4 mb/d, assuming they aren't really in decline as a group. There are ongoing problems with building out refinery capacity too - hear about all the diesel shortages in China?

So, all in all I think this will be a ho hum BAU year of steady increase, ala 2007. Maybe a bit of a dip in there. If my WAG of $88.33 holds for this month - and why wouldn't it? - that will be a gain of precisely $17 YOY, too. So I feel extra confident with these throws of the dart. Maybe.

High: $110
Low: $82
Close: $98

[careinke]

I'm betting on a Black Swan.

High: 151
Low: 69.15
Close: 148

[Carlhole]

High - $110

Low - $80

Average - $90

[pup55]

Code: Select all

   High   Low   Close
vtsnowedin   137   77   119
dolanbaker   124   82   115
sparky   150   80   122
obixman   135   82.5   130
Ibon   147   72   123
eXpat   140   90   120
SteinarN   112   79   102
TheDude   110   82   98
careinke   151   69.15   148
Carlhole   110   80   


A gold star to all but one of you, for correctly following the directions to post high, low and close.....

[sparky]

.
possible Black swans

.....severe turmoil in the stock markets IE dow jones down more than 400 points in a week
.....the Persian gulf at war
.....the greenback collapse by more than 30% against gold
..... disastrous northern harvest , food inflation crush the world economy

That's all I can think of from the top of my head
but if nothing too bad happen , the oil market should keep steady on an up trend

[PeakOiler]

First of all, Thanks for your kind words, pupp. I'll help again this year too.

Here are my WAGs:
High:115.49
Low: 79.65
Close: 110.11

If Ludi plays, I'll bet her some kind of homegrown produce...

pupp55: Do you grow any tradable produce?

Here's my list so far:

[Ludi]

Sorry, PeakOiler, I can't play this game, don't follow the prices or know enough to make a guess!

[Daniel_Plainview]

High = 99
Low = 83
Close = 88

[TheDude]

Ack, new site software is adding leading and trailing spaces to the numbers Pup's posting. Solution for OpenOffice Calc if anyone else is having these problems (less than very unlikely but):

REMOVE SPACES
You can use find/replace with regular expressions.
To remove leading spaces:
- search for ^[:space:]+
- Replace with nothing.
- Click more options and tick Regular expressions
- Replace all.

To remove trailing spaces you do the same, but with a different search term: [:space:]+$

Dunno if that works for MS etc but maybe.

Ludi - guess away. No harm in it after all, it's not like blowing money on a lottery ticket.

[pup55]

Do you grow any tradable produce?

hmmmm.... well, I am a home brewer....

[ColossalContrarian]

High - 119

Low - 83

Close - 101