 Hello, welcome to this week's CMC Markets Commodity Snapshot. This week we're going to be looking at Brent Crude Oil and we're going to have a slight change of pace. We're going to jump straight into a four-hour chart just so we can see the recent breakout higher that we've seen in prices and talk further about the outlook and whether that's sustainable. Now, as you can see from this four-hour candlestick chart, there was a very tight range in prices. Prices were essentially bouncing around between $47 and $49 per barrel, but then we had this huge spike higher and prices had just bounced off the bottom of a former trading range in December at around $59 per barrel and we've seen a pullback from there. Now why did we see that rally higher out of this trading range in oil? Well, there's been a couple of things, namely the rig count inside North America has come down, so we saw a drop of 94 U.S. oil rigs, 11 Canadian oil rigs, so generally that means that the less rigs there are taken oil out of the ground, the lesser the production is going to be. Now, there has not actually been a drop in U.S. production yet in crude oil. Neither has there been any signs of a production cut from OPEC members, like Saudi Arabia, even some countries like Iran and Iraq are actually increasing production, so still overall oil production is high, but there are some signs that in the coming year it could come down, namely from North America. The other factor is that it is earnings season at the moment and we've had earnings from all the oil majors and although most of them have reported pretty sharp drops in profit, they've actually not been quite as bad as some analysts were expecting and the shares have reacted quite well and that has softened the fears that some of these oil companies were going to get really hard hit by the drop in oil prices. The other element to their earnings reports has been that they have been mostly announcing quite big cuts in capital expenditure for the next year, so again that feeds into the idea that some of those cuts are going to be in the exploration side of things and the actual production bringing the oil out of the ground, so further indication of maybe less oil production in 2015. On the flip side of that and why this may in fact not be the bottom in oil prices is that we did get further data on the demand side from China, their services PMI disappointed and as a result the Chinese central bank actually went ahead and eased monetary policy by cutting their reserve ratio at the banks, so still signs that global demand is not going to be quite there even if there is a fall in production, so in answer to whether this is a bottom in oil prices we just don't know yet, a sign that perhaps there is is coming from the the longer term chart, let's have a look at the monthly chart now for Brent Crude oil. Now again this is the monthly candlestick chart for Brent Crude and there are just three supporting factors here that don't tell us that there is a bottom in oil prices but certainly are supportive of the possibility. Firstly there is this rising trend line you can see that prices have recently moved through and closed above for the month, there are also these opening and closing levels from January, February and March 2009 which correspond around to the current low and you can see that we did close the month above that $50 per barrel mark that psychological number that a lot of people have in mind. So these two factors, these three factors in combination with this short-term chart where we saw this large spike higher really what we're looking for at this situation is another low to be formed somewhere above that trading range that we were previously in, that would be some indication on the short term that actually this move higher is sustainable and we're actually going to turn things around to maybe not a massive uptrend but at least more of a sideways market. Okay that's it for this week CMC markets commodity snapshot we're of course looking at Brent Crude oil the main considerations here are the demand side especially from the likes of China how is global growth moving forward or is it moving backwards and the further data that we can see particularly on the rig count from the US and capital expenditure cuts from the major oil exploring companies.