RIO’s fat tail

Thursday 2 April 2015

It is a revealing fact about market sentiment that Australia’s large LNG players are trading reasonably healthily based upon the forward curve in the oil market. Because oil is seen rebounding in the outer years, that’s an excuse to not write down assets and raise capital.

At the same time, however the forward curve in iron ore is being completely ignored. Today the twelve month swap in Singapore is at $44 and crashing doing this to RIO’s outlook:

Yet the action in RIO shares overnight was very subdued with London down just 0.36% and New York down 0.91%.

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About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.