LONDON - Signals are growing that oil's price surge could push all the way to $70 a barrel, according to the technical analysts who forecast market trends by interpreting chart patterns.
Crude's 60 percent run-up this year to $50 record highs has been driven in part by fund investors who use chart signals to guide many of their big-money bets. With prices now in uncharted territory, technical analysts say the blistering rally shows few signs of slowing and suggest prices could peak at $70 - nearly $20 above current prices.
While momentum and relative strength indicators (RSI) are heavily overbought, normally signalling a selling opportunity, the rest of the market's behaviour suggest prices could well do the opposite and go higher, the analysts said. "Shorting high RSI markets is extremely dangerous in a rampant bull market. A top will define itself only when prices climb sharply higher on heavy volume, but reverse to close at their lows," Edward Meir at Man Energy said.
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Crude's run above $53 on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and over $49 for London's Brent crude extends a near six-year bull run that has quintupled prices from December 1998 lows at $9.55 for Brent and $10.35 on NYMEX. Phil Roberts at Barclays Capital said the longer NYMEX crude stayed above $47 a barrel the more likely it would become that the market was in the build up to a "classic commodity spike, suggesting $75 as a possible target."
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Then again, we know how accurate market analysts are at predicting stock movements, so we shall see . . .
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/27674/story.htm