This week, Hao Pay has got his eyes on BHP strikes and he's here to tell you why. The People's Broker will be focusing on the OPEC meeting set to take place this Sunday. Meanwhile, the dry freight markets are still buzzing from positive sentiments. All this and more on freight up.

Freight up.

Hello, and welcome to freight up. My name is Fernanda and I'll be your host as we navigate the seas of freight and come of these. We've got a juicy episode for you this week, but before we dive on into that, we're going to ask you to just take a moment, take a breath, and make sure that you're following this show, which you can conveniently do on our website, freightuppodcast.com. Did you do it? Okay. All right, perfect. Now we can get into the show. Let's start with Archie. Archie, the People's Broker, breaker of chains, how are you?

I'm very well, Frankie, how are you?

I'm good. Better question though.

Yeah.

How is the fuel market doing?

Fuel market FIS really all over the place. Yeah, there's quite a lot going on. I'll start with what's going on with crude. This week's crude has been really flat, really sideways, very range bound, not really doing much, but last week was pretty turbulent. The front future slumped last Thursday down to like 76 $60 per barrel. That's the jan contract. Yeah. Having traded around like 81, 82 for quite a while.

Yeah, we saw a really sharp slump on Thursday, ended up settling well over $4 lower on the day.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah, and there was no real instant macro headlines or stories that came out that kind of caused that to happen. I think it was really just a build up of this ongoing kind of poor woeful demand outlook on a quite global scale that's been ticking in the background. As well as that, there was a US stockpile build last week, which is like the second or third consecutive week that there's been stockpile builds, obviously hinting at that larger supply factor and yeah, Thursday all just really came off. Another thing to consider is there could have been some stop losses in the market at certain points that were hit on that day. As soon as market gets there, selling out of a big position, so it just snowballs the selling. We came off massively Thursday, but then found support again on Friday and into this week basically. So pretty much those losses have been reversed completely, basically, and we're back pretty sideways. I think markets very much sitting on their hands.

Looking ahead to the OPEC meeting this weekend on Sunday, I think the general consensus was that they were going to extend the ongoing production cuts. Obviously Saudi and Russia have been cutting output each month since summer.

Yeah, fairly aggressively.

Yeah, exactly. And yeah, the general consensus was that these cuts are then going to be extended well into 2024, but who knows, you got to wait and see what's said on Sunday.

The market kind of expects that, though. Freight.

Yeah, exactly. And you could argue that it's getting priced in as we speak. Like you mentioned, if something is expected, then it gets priced in before the actual announcement comes. But there'll always be a little bit of shake up Monday morning. Okay, but it's just one of those things you've got to see what happens. And another thing with kind of market participants sitting on their hands and waiting is obviously we've got Thanksgiving tomorrow.

Yes.

And that will affect liquidity and kind of just general market sentiment. Any excuse for a holiday, really. I know it's massive in America, but I'm talking market wide, everyone's Thanksgiving.

I'll leave it till next week with everything. We celebrate golden week here.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, it's just anything, really. The crude build that was released last week, that was of 3.6 million barrels, fair sum. And actually the API weekly data that came out yesterday showed a build of over 9 million crude barrels. However, market was pretty unaffected by that.

Really?

Yeah. I think people look more to the EIA data. So you've got two lots of data that come out. You've got the API American Petroleum Institution, which comes out Tuesday evenings, that came out last night, showed a build of 9 million barrels. But then what the market really looks at and reacts to more is EIA. It's two different institutions and they're basically releasing the data on the US stockpiles. I think just to round it up. It's just be like I said, how obviously we really came off at the end Thursday last week, and now we're back to where we were.

It is mainly because of that support from people's expectations that OPEC are going to extend the cuts. And that's where the main bulk of support has come from, really.