Yes, Gail's style is clear, precise and easy to read, gettin to the point without unecessary "crowing". There's probably a simple reason for this which I won't bother to go into. Maybe more of us could take a leaf out of Gail's book?

I would agree that total inventories would probably be more worthwhile to look at than the crude inventories that seem to be agonized over weekly. I haven't done any analysis of this type, so don't really understand the pitfalls.

As an actuary, I spend my life analyzing noisy data, making forecasts, and writing reports about what I see. So it isn't a whole lot different from looking at the oil data, and analyzing what I see, and writing a TOD story. Since our audiences to do not understand actuarial-ese, we have to try to explain things relatively simply.

I like to think of myself as a "big picture" person. The fact that one has a huge amount of detail doesn't mean that one has to break the data into its finest components for every analysis. Very often, the noisiness of monthly data gets in the way of making sensible interpretation of the data.

Having said it might be interesting, I thought why be lazy, and produced these - my flatmates might rightly observe that they were actually produced out of laziness, as a way to avoid what I should have been doing.

All from EIA data, averaged Jan-Dec or Jan-Aug for 2007, including days supply, which is from barrels of product supplied, so ignores any refinery processing gains on the crude and SPR portions.

My first time attempting this kinda thing, so apologies for formatting issues etc. Click on for bigger (hopefully, if I did it right).

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Jaymax (cornucomer-doomopian)