(Bloomberg) -- Crude oil is the world’s most important commodity, but it’s worthless without a refinery turning it into the products that people actually use: gasoline, diesel, jet-fuel and petrochemicals for plastics. And the world’s refining industry today is in pain like never before.“Refining margins are absolutely catastrophic,” Patrick Pouyanne, the head of Europe’s top oil refining group Total SA, told investors last month, echoing a widely held view among executives, traders and analysts.What happens to the oil refining industry at this juncture will have ripple effects across the rest of the energy industry. The multi-billion-dollar plants employ thousands of people and a wave of closures and bankruptcies looms.“We believe we are entering into an ‘age of consolidation’ for the refining industry,” said Nikhil Bhandari, refining analyst at Goldman Sachs Inc. The top names of the industry, which collectively processed well over $2 trillion worth of oil last year, are giants...
Singapore's High Court has appointed an independent supervisor to oversee the restructuring of trader Hontop Energy. The move came after Malaysian lender CIMB, its biggest creditor, raised concerns about what it described as 'suspicious' deals involving oil major BP , according to an affidavit filed with the court this week and reviewed by Reuters. Hontop, the trading arm of Chinese independent refiner China Wanda Holding Group Co Ltd, is one of four commodity trading firms in Singapore which ran into financial trouble as the oil price crashed....
How do you pick the next stock to invest in? One way would be to spend days of research browsing through thousands of publicly traded companies. However, an easier way is to look at the stocks that smart money investors are collectively bullish on. Hedge funds and other institutional investors usually invest large amounts of […]...
We know that hedge funds generate strong, risk-adjusted returns over the long run, which is why imitating the picks that they are collectively bullish on can be a profitable strategy for retail investors. With billions of dollars in assets, professional investors have to conduct complex analyses, spend many resources and use tools that are not […]...
