Oil consolidates ahead of next week’s OPEC meeting

Oil benchmarks are trading in the sideways manner as traders prefer to wait on the sidelines ahead of the next week’s OPEC meeting, where the cartel may announce a production cut.

At the time of writing, WTI oil was trading flat around $47.92/barrel. Brent oil was trading comatose as well around $48.92/barrel.

OPEC will meet on Nov 30 where it may agree to cut produce and may also include non-OPEC members like Russia in the exercise. There is consensus among analysts that the cartel may finally come up with some kind of a output deal, however it remains to be seen if that would be enough to rebalancing the oil prices.

Apart from the OPEC meeting uncertainty, a strong US dollar, trading at the highest level since 2003 against the basket of currencies is also forcing the oil bulls to remain on the sidelines.