Oil Traders Snap Up Bullish Options for $80 Brent Next Year
- Equivalent of 32 million barrels traded since last Friday
- Spate of similar bullish bets seen over the last two months
The silhouette of an electric oil pump jack is seen at dusk in the oil fields surrounding Midland, Texas, on Nov. 7, 2017.
Photographer: Luke Sharrett/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Oil traders are increasingly betting that Brent crude will climb to $80 a barrel from the middle of next year, as OPEC and its allies prepare for a second year of output cuts amid simmering geopolitical tensions.
More than 32,000 option contracts giving traders the right to buy Brent at $80 for June 2018 onward traded in the last week, when the market was also shaken by the shutdown of a major North Sea pipeline. That’s the equivalent of 32 million barrels, with a total cost of about $9 million. One-in-five Brent contracts traded on Thursday were $80 calls, according to ICE Futures Europe data.