 Okay, I hope you're doing well and just wanted to put out this breaking piece because WTI crude futures into this US session are up Maybe $10 and it follows a parabolic move we had in nickel prices yesterday And of course all of this really coming from this ongoing Russian Ukraine situation The latest what I'm going to cover here is as you can see from these headlines about US oil ban We've also got UK oil bans EU oil bans the Russian retaliation effect with Nord Stream 1 It's going to potentially impact Germany which has also got people nervous this morning And then you've also got some of these other commodity prices both in base metals as well as soft agricultural goods all rallying At this point in time So let's get straight to it and talk about the oil price And here's just a look at a 30-minute candlestick chart And as you can see here as we've gone into the North American crossover prices have gone quite steeply higher up to around 128-84 at the session high so far so up around eight and a half dollars on the day a lot of this coinciding with some of those aforementioned headlines that have been hitting the tape but in context This is what it looks like on a weekly candlestick to give it a bit of context over the period going back to 2007 the peak that we had in 2008 up at 147 certainly doesn't look off the table at this point in time and Just to see the type of price movement that we've had where we were trading really a 90 dollar handle Prior to the invasion taking place at the end of Feb to where we're at now trading knocking on a door of 130 here for the time being So what are these headlines? What is it you need to be aware of? Well, the Biden administration will impose a ban on US imports of Russian energy today Importantly without the participation of its European allies That's according to people familiar with the matter Joe Biden is due to speak at 345 London times So I'm recording this ahead of that So we're going to see probably the confirmation of some of these reports We've had a merge over the last 24 hours the ban itself is going to include Russian oil liquefied natural gas and coal and to give it some numbers To have context Russian oil made up about 3% of all the crude shipments that arrived in the US last year according to the EIA in the US and overall imports of Russian oil and petroleum products represented around 8% of the US total And this is a comparison to the gas supply that Germany depends on Russia, which is around a third So 30% plus and so you can see here as well What will be interested to watch is the relationship between the US looking to take such aggressive action When really the retaliation effect is probably going to be more targeted at Europe Which is supposed to be the allied nations of course around the US and the unified West now the other things here Is it's not just the US we've also had the UK come out UK government plans to phase out all imports of Russian oil is later sanctions move here We've heard announced within the last hour over this war in Ukraine is again citing people familiar with the matter So yet to see official confirmation from the government the move would be in Concert with the US and the bound would be phased in over the coming months. So do keep that in mind. This isn't this kind of Metaphoric kind of twisting of the wheel and the gas and oil just goes on and off quite simply They're talking about this being over a period of multiple months And the band won't apply to Russian gas They're just talking about specifically oil and this could be quite an interesting play that you see Unique to individual countries and their stance is depending on the dependency on those individual products Of course going further forward then you've got the EU So it's coming on multiple fronts at the moment and the European Union has published a plan just a short while ago to cut Russian gas imports by two-thirds within a year is their target as it seeks to reduce its dependency on the country's fuel Supplies given Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. So multiple things all happening and one of the big things that we're seeing as well this is the pipeline infrastructure, of course of important gas pipelines in Europe and Late yesterday, you probably would have clocked comments in the Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak He came out and basically threatened to cut off natural gas supplies in Europe through Nord Stream 1 This comes of course after Germany's decision to block the licensing and the agreements over the new Nord Stream 2 and This was always the the kind of tail risk of retaliation That could have ensued and has done now from the verbal at least threats have come by way of Russia So that's also fired things up a little bit Nord Stream 1 Is owned and operated by Nord Stream, which is the majority shareholder in the Russian state company Gazprom There are other European players involved with that But my understanding is is that Gazprom is the majority owner of that and so obviously What decisions they make and the integral then to The gas flow that does come through other key strategic networks from Russia like the Yamal Europe and brotherhood But Nord Stream 1 being impact would have huge consequences Novak went on to say it's absolutely clear quote his words that rejection of Russian oil would lead to a catastrophic Consequences for the global market even stating the oil market could reach 300 bucks a barrel So it really is kind of a game of bluff at the moment But it's getting all the more serious as time goes on the other final thing then is it's just metal prices have also Nickel yesterday was just insane. The metal surge from 20,000 to 100,000 bucks a ton Nickel is used in stainless steel. It's used in electric vehicle batteries And so I saw some comments coming out of VW There's been comments out of Tesla and so forth because the costs implications is going to have they're going to be huge The market on the London metal exchange the LME is in the grip of what's being termed as a massive short squeeze Which explains some of the rationale of how sharp this price movement has been Which is holders as substantial short positions are being forced to cover at a time of particularly low liquidity because of what's been going on with the Russian sanctions Yang Guangda who controls the world's largest nickel producer called Qing Shan Holdings Group is known as the big short in China Has closed out part of the company's short positions and apparently then that's been incredibly painful for the tune of multiple double-digit billions of dollars To give you an idea as well context again, Russian produces about 17% of the world's top grade nickel And this rapid surge in prices is obviously going to have huge cost implications They said for some of those EV manufacturers Why are people short nickel well traders nickel producers use short positions to hedge essentially against volatility long-term contracts or physical and They've just got caught the wrong side of this trade and it's just happened in a blink and almost like a flash crash And it's really been almost a GameStop esque type move that obviously someone's gonna have to pay the consequence for it And and so far the talk in town is that it's a Chinese company that's gonna gonna have to handle and swallow that loss Then you've got wheat prices as well continue to trade up higher this morning We're now talking prices moving towards $14 now a bushel and Germany is gonna host a special meeting of agricultural ministers From G7 countries later this month try to assess the impacts and see what can be done to manage that situation Finally going back to the metal space check out gold prices as well gold has also mimicked a lot of this General commodity type move in terms of a flight to quality bid helping The yellow metal shine in these current conditions and if we look at this on a weekly for gold you can see here We're right at a strategically important point here in terms of the price action So in back in 2008 if we're looking at the oil we were down here gold really peaked back in 2011 We had the initial peak Shortly after a few months from the onset of the corona virus pandemic And we're right up at that mark as we speak looking at gold futures here training at 20 63 at the moment so oil still rallying as I'm speaking at the moment keeping an eye out for Biden shortly But yeah, it's all going off at the moment in the commodity market. And so yeah, hopefully that update helps All right, take care speak soon