Welcome to 2021! We finally have that train wreck of a year 2020 behind us, and it’s time to look forward. At RBN, we have a long-standing tradition of doing just that in our annual Top 10 Energy Prognostications, where we lay out our expectations for the most important developments for the coming year. But how is that possible amid the chaotic market conditions still ahead? So much has changed, so many market factors have been disrupted, and so few guideposts remain unscathed, there is just no way to predict what is going to happen next, right? Nah. All we need to do is stick out our collective RBN necks one more time, peer into our crystal ball, and see what 2021 has in store.
This makes nine years we’ve been posting RBN Prognostications. To keep us honest, part of our tradition is to look back at how we did the previous year. And usually we do our look-back and the coming year’s Prognostications in the same blog. But 2020 was so tumultuous and the landscape for 2021 so uncertain, this time around we split our New Year’s blog into two pieces. Friday’s blog, 2020 Scorecard, was the look back. Given that we did not predict the global pandemic that overshadowed everything, we did have some misses last year, but in the big scheme of life, we did OK. Now it’s time for our 2021 Prognostications, a year where the outlook is about as murky as it’s ever going to get. That’s the best reason we know to peel back the layers to see what could really be ahead for energy markets.
2021 – Year of the Ox
Back when we first started our Prognostications blogs, we needed all the help we could get to see into the future. And so we consulted the Chinese zodiac. As an analytical tool, it seems to have worked pretty well. In 2015, after the oil price crash, we had Year of The Goat — oil was certainly the goat that year. 2016 was Year of the Monkey — a lot of monkey business going on. 2018 was Year of the Dog, and we asked, “Who let the dogs out?” We were getting greedy in 2019, Year of the Pig. And of course, 2020 was Year of the Rat. What better zodiac animal could the Chinese pick for 2020?
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