60%+ returns in 2025: Here’s how AI-powered stock investing has changed the game
Oil remains stuck in the mud at the Monday open, unable to thoroughly shake off Friday’s sharper losses, as crude bulls face a narrative shift they really didn’t want this early in the winter demand cycle: President Zelenskyy signalling he’s willing to work with Washington on a peace blueprint. In a market already skating on thin fundamental ice, even the whiff of de-escalation is enough to spook longs. Peace means barrels. Barrels mean pressure. And pressure is precisely what crude bulls don’t need.
WTI is now staring down a further stair-step down day, with price action behaving like a market slowly bleeding lower on sentiment rather than any single catalyst. Even the bullish data points are being ignored. U.S. crude inventories fell 3.4 million barrels last week—normally an automatic morning bid—but traders barely twitched. When geopolitics outranks physical balances at the open, you know positioning has already cracked.
Zelenskyy’s peace posture hit just as U.S. sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil went live, targeting subsidiaries that funnel revenue directly into the Kremlin’s fossil-fuel machine. Under normal market logic, tighter sanctions plus geopolitical uncertainty would buoy crude. But the sanction effect is fully priced—Urals already trades at a $23 discount—so traders treated the news as noise rather than fuel.
What’s preventing crude from falling straight through the trapdoor this morning is the same current lifting equity futures: revived rate-cut hopes. After last week’s bruising cross-asset rout, traders are creeping back into the idea that the Fed may still ease early next year. That trims the dollar, relaxes financial conditions, and gives oil just enough macro padding to stop the slide from becoming a rout. It’s not upward momentum—it’s a floor. A thin one, but a floor nonetheless.
Brent may be 35–40 cents off Friday’s lows, but price remains capped near $62—a level acting more like a ceiling than a pivot. Meanwhile, OPEC+ still casts a bearish shadow, intent on lifting output in December before pausing in early 2026. If crude keeps dribbling lower, the market will quickly ask whether the group stays committed to that trajectory.
For now, though, the next big driver won’t come from refinery runs or tanker trackers—it’ll come from Kyiv and Washington. The peace calculus sits at the center of the crude market’s Monday mood. One credible framework could erase the remaining geopolitical premium or redraw the forward curve entirely. December’s crude story is poised to be written in political ink, not supply-and-demand spreadsheets.