By Izabella Kamkinska

Stephen Schork of the Schork report makes an excellent point regarding recent large US inventory crude draws.

As he explains, with reference to contango:

In other words, the market is paying you to build supplies by virtue of the discount on nearby material. If the recent run-up in price was based on real demand for wet barrels, then this discount would disappear, i.e. the market would be moving from contango toward backwardation. That is not the case at this time. Thus, the ongoing drawdown in U.S. crude oil supplies (outside of Cushing) is not demand driven, but rather a function of lower domestic production and fewer imports. In other words, refiners, as any good grocer would tell you, are aggressively emptying the shelves, as it were, of surplus material.