Simon Watkins is a former senior FX trader and salesman, financial journalist, and best-selling author. He was Head of Forex Institutional Sales and Trading for Credit Lyonnais, and later Director of Forex at Bank of Montreal. He was then Head of Weekly Publications and Chief Writer for Business Monitor International, Head of Fuel Oil Products for Platts, and Global Managing Editor of Research for Renaissance Capital in Moscow. He has written extensively on oil and gas, Forex, equities, bonds, economics and geopolitics for many leading publications, and has worked as a geopolitical risk consultant for a number of major hedge funds in London, Moscow, and Dubai. In addition, he has authored five books on finance, oil, and financial markets trading published by ADVFN and available on Amazon, Apple, and Kobo.
Reaching natural gas production of one billion cubic meters per day (bcm/d) has been one of the three core hydrocarbons resource strategies of Iran since…
Kuwait had already slipped into an economic contraction of 1.1 per cent the fourth quarter of 2019, over the same period in the previous year,…
The announcement on 13 August that Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will normalise relations, around the same as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…
One of the three key priorities for Iran – along with completing all of the phases on its supergiant South Pars natural gas field and…
Former senior intelligence operative and now Iraq’s Prime Minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, spent last week in Washington trying to maintain his exceptionally dangerous balancing act between…
Having failed to achieve the slightest semblance of success in the two oil price wars that it started – the first running from 2014 to…
Although the focus of oil markets in recent months has been on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and of the latest Saudi Arabia-instigated oil…
China continues to expand its influence in the Middle East through oil and infrastructure deals, and the latest deal with ADNOC is a great example…
Central now to Russia’s hydrocarbons-related power is its Arctic sector oil and gas reserves. These comprise over 35,700 billion cubic metres of natural gas and…
Like many Middle Eastern countries in the catastrophic aftermath of Saudi Arabia’s latest oil price war folly against the U.S. shale sector, Oman has been…
A number of high-profile reports last week cited data released on 26 July by China’s General Administration of Customs (GAC) as clear evidence that China…
There are four key reasons why Iraq is increasing the pace of development on a number of its major oil fields right now. First, it…
Two key questions logically arise from last week’s announcement from Iran’s Petroleum Ministry that it has awarded a US$1.3 billion development deal to more than…
The idea of developing the 4.36 billion-barrel Nasiriyah oilfield in southern Iraq’s Dhi Qar province has been seriously mooted by the each of the rapid…
Ensuring a leading position in the exploration and development of the Arctic’s huge gas deposits has long been a key part of President Vladimir Putin’s…
Alongside the continued development of its huge West Karoun oil fields, the completion of the supergiant South Pars non-associated gas offshore sector (including the implementation…
The resumption of crude oil imports from Iraq by Jordan announced last week by the Kingdom’s Energy Minister, Hala Zawati, will give Baghdad’s (and Tehran’s)…
With a projected budget breakeven oil price of US$69.1 per barrel of Brent this year, according to IMF figures, but accounting for around 96.8 per…
Last August, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Zarif, paid a visit to his China counterpart, Wang Yi, to present a roadmap on a comprehensive 25-year China-Iran…
Even before the latest Saudi-instigated oil war crashed oil prices, Oman had a budget breakeven price per barrel of Brent of over US$85, with a…