Following Citi’s warning that OPEC might be about to screw the pooch, Goldman is out with its own words of caution.

“With the rhetoric not matching the logic for the first time in years, we believe that the outcome of this meeting is much more uncertain than usual,” Courvalin wrote. “We believe that oil prices have overshot fundamentals and that price risks are skewed to the downside into Thursday’s meeting.”

The research included a nifty graph illustrating what we discussed last week: excessive long positioning has consistently resulted in price declines.Not surprisingly, CL has ignored these latest naysayers and has continued to hold its gains of the last two months — despite the negative divergence, excessive spec long positions, etc.And, even though prices at the pump continue to settle lower, RBOB is holding on to its gains.  With only 3 sessions left in November, are we looking at another 2%+ CPI read?

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Note that CL is well above Nov 2016’s range and paying strict attention to a bullish TL.

RB continues to bounce.

The culprit?  Dollar weakness, as evidenced by the USDJPY and EURUSD. USDJPY faces an important test of the white channel midline at 111.42.  If it can punch through and retake the SMA100 and SMA200 (111.58-111.68) then it should have some good momentum going forward.  If it can’t, then I’d look for it to drop to the yellow midline around 110.2ish.The market’s rally continues to take precedence over everything else — even a problematic CPI read. SPX will make a new high on the opening this morning.  It still owes us a backtest of the purple channel top — which at this point would constitute a measly .382 Fib retracement.  But, don’t bet on it happening until oil and gas tumble and VIX stops making new lows.And, since SPX is now atop a new round number (2600), it might not happen at all.

More later.

UPDATE:  12:20 PM

With Fed Gov. Powell playing the dove card so well, stocks are having no trouble melting up.  There is some potential resistance here for ES and SPX, as both are approaching 1.618 extensions of the last significant decline as well as the tops of rising wedges.  I wouldn’t necessarily short stocks here.  But, I do think VIX is very likely to pop up to our yellow channel bottom target over the next few days.  It’s currently around 13.33.