Oil Investors Nervous About Syria Strike Fallout

U.S. oil prices rose to their highest levels in a month Friday following a U.S. missile strike on a Syrian airbase. Oil exchange-traded funds such as the United States Oil Fund LP (ticker: USO) and the United States Brent Oil Fund LP (BNO) were also higher on Friday after WTI crude prices pushed above $52 a barrel and Brent oil prices traded at more than $55 a barrel.

The U.S. attack on Syria comes just several days after a poison gas attack in Syria, which the U.S. government believes involved the use of nerve agent sarin, killed 70 people.

“Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack,” President Donald Trump said of the poison gas attack. “No child of God should ever suffer such horror.”

Even former Trump rival Hillary Clinton supports the U.S. air strikes.

“I really believe we should have and still should take out [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s] air fields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drip sarin gas on them,” Clinton said in an interview at the Women in the World Summit this week.

While Syria isn’t a major oil producer, its Middle East location and alliances with other oil producers have investors concerned about the potential fallout from the U.S. strikes.

Russia, the second-largest global oil producer, has already condemned the U.S. strikes as illegal aggression.

Investor concerns about conflict escalation in Syria and rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia could drive oil and other commodity prices higher in coming days. From a fundamental market perspective, U.S. oil prices have also been supported by a production outage in Canada following a plant fire.

WTI crude oil prices broke…

Click here to continue reading

Want to learn more about how to profit off the stock market? Or maybe you just want to be able to look sophisticated in front of your coworkers when they ask you what you are reading on your Kindle, and you’d prefer to tell them “Oh, I’m just reading a book about stock market analysis,” rather than the usual “Oh, I’m just looking at pics of my ex-girlfriend on Facebook.” For these reasons and more, check out my book, Beating Wall Street with Common SenseI don’t have a degree in finance; I have a degree in neuroscience. You don’t have to predict what stocks will do if you can predict what traders will do and be one step ahead of them. I made a 400% return in the stock market over five years using only basic principles of psychology and common sense. Beating Wall Street with Common Sense is now available on Amazon, and tradingcommonsense.com is always available on your local internet!