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“Oil prices will stay under pressure in 2015,” he wrote. “However, current prices are not sustainable in the longer term. The interplay between extreme weakness in the short term and the potential for supply shortfalls in the medium term should create attractive trading opportunities over the course of the coming 12 months.”
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Saudi Arabia and its allies are seeking to drive high-cost producers from the market, Hall said in his letter. While many have assumed this is U.S. shale drillers, the majority can operate at lower prices, he wrote. The most vulnerable operate in Canada’s oil sands and deep-water production, said Hall.
Cuts in spending this year will set the stage for an eventual supply shortfall, said Hall, who has long held that oil will become more expensive. Once prices begin a sustained increase, companies won’t be able to count on as much new crude from projects. The low prices also increase the risk of geopolitical instability, another factor that could boost oil if a major producer is unable to make exports, Hall said.
Strategists at Goldman Sachs group Inc. that advise the bank’s wealthy individual clients said yesterday that U.S. producers have “aggressively” cut back, which will lead to rising prices.
“U.S. producers have started to respond, and quite aggressively,” Brett Nelson, head of tactical asset allocation in Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management’s Investment Strategy Group, said yesterday at a presentation in New York. “This in combination with general stabilization in growth in the broader global context will allow oil prices to settle into a $60 to $80 range in the second half of the year.”