 Hello, welcome to this week's CMC Markets Commodity Snapshot with myself Jasper Lawler. Today we're going to be looking at Brent's crude oil. The price has been trapped in a really tight range for the last couple of weeks and we're going to be looking at some potential factors that could cause a breakout from that range. Now though the price action has been very compressed in the last couple of weeks, actually we've seen quite a few gyrations in the price of oil. We saw a big run-up from the start of the year where geopolitical tensions in Ukraine, in Iraq, across the globe really, even in China, really were driving up the price. But in the last few weeks, the last couple of months, we've seen a real collapse and so now we're finding ourselves at this base level and we're in this contracted range and we want to decide well what's going to cause a breakout. A potential factor are two economic reports from today. One is the GDP report from the US. The other is the FOMC meeting from the Federal Reserve. Now these two reports kind of combine in their significance because the FOMC has been propping up the global economy with its very loose monetary policy and the outcome of that policy should be higher growth across the world, including the US. But that's not what happened in the first quarter. We saw a massive drop in GDP in the first quarter, a drop by 2.9% annually in the first quarter for the US. So we're looking for a bounce back and those two policies combine. So the two together really do give us an outlook for global growth and that ties in with oil because without these geopolitical tensions it really remains as to how much demand there is for oil versus the supply of oil. The demand obviously increases when there's more global growth. Now we've seen increased supplies from the US and their increasing production so that's a downward force. The upward force has to come from growth and obviously the largest economy in the world is the US, hence the importance of this report today. Now let's zoom in on this tight range that we've been looking at in the price of oil. We've been in a 150 cent range with about 106 on the bottom end, 10750 on the top end. Now we're right in the middle right now so it's not giving us too much clues based on this four hour chart that I'm going to show you right here. You can see the range right there and from this chart you can't really tell which way the break out is going to happen. Now when you get a tight range like this, one way to play it is really not to try and judge which way the break out is going to happen from. Rather just when the break out does happen, trade that break out straight away as a price moves beyond one of these barriers or a certain percentage beyond one of these barriers as an extra level of caution or you can look at a close for the day or for the hour or for whatever time period you're trading beyond one of these barriers or you could look for a move through it and a pullback to that former support or resistance area and then look to trade from there at a more preferential price. But if you did want to try and judge the direction, something you can do is pull back to a longer term chart which I'm going to show you now is the weekly chart for crude oil and you can see the week before last we had a strong hammer pattern off some support just as you can see on the four hour chart around this kind of 10450 area. So that hammer formation is typically bullish and then the following week we saw a weakish but still nevertheless a bullish engulfing candlestick. So on the weekly formation it's looking like a potential move higher but if we zoom down to this four hour chart it's obviously looking sideways it could go either way. Perhaps that weekly chart lends towards the upside but still we'll have to wait and see particularly for this GDP report today. So that's it for this week's CMT markets commodity snapshot. Keep an eye on the price of oil, look out for this potential breakout. Keep an eye obviously on today's reports the GDP and the FOMC the Federal Reserve in the US and if that wasn't enough for you keep an eye on the non-farm payrolls report on Friday and we'll be holding our weekly webinar on that.