Tom Holland

Tom Holland

Deputy Global Research Director

Tom helps to steer Gavekal’s global research, with a special focus on energy markets. Before joining Gavekal in 2014 he worked as an analyst and commentator at media organizations including CNBC, The Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review, earning his spurs as the lead foreign exchange analyst for Dow Jones during the 1997-98 Asian currency crisis. He originally started his working life as an exploration geologist, until a collapse in commodity prices forced him into journalism as the traditional refuge of the otherwise unemployable.

Tom Holland's Articles

Selected research

Confirmation Bias In Action
22 Aug 2024
During Wednesday’s trading, the price of the front-month WTI crude oil future fell -3% to its lowest since early January. Although the price ticked up a few cents before the end of US hours, it remained below US$72/bbl, down from more than US$80/bbl just over a week earlier. The perversity comes because it was far easier to identify reasons why this fall did not happen than convincing reasons why it did.
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Video: Aramco, Oil And Saudi's Economic Transition
7 Jun 2024
Saudi Arabia’s US$11bn follow-on offering for oil giant Aramco follows a spate of Saudi sovereign issues this year in domestic and international debt markets. Nevertheless, talk that Riyadh is facing a mounting fiscal squeeze as it attempts to fund a list of expensive mega-projects as part of an unrealistic economic transition program are exaggerated.
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A Barrel Half Empty
A Barrel Half Empty
Tom Holland
4 Jun 2024
The market's verdict on Sunday’s Opec+ production agreement was brutal, with Brent and WTI on Tuesday each down around -8% from a week earlier to its lowest since early February. In this piece Tom revisits the likely evolution of oil supply and demand over the next 15 months to assess whether Opec’s barrel is half full, as the cartel would like to believe, or half empty, as oil futures traders clearly concluded.
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