Imf Warning And Hot Inflation Pull Investors Into Bullish Oil Bets As Price Holds $95

What Happened

The Brent crude oil price holds near $95 a barrel, climbing for a second straight week even after a 13% monthly drop, as an IMF warning on oil-driven inflation pulls investors back toward the long side.

Hotter inflation gives oil bulls a reason to add exposure, which explains how investors are now positioning.

Why Investors Are Quietly Buying Oil Calls

Market Context

The clearest sign sits in options markets, where traders are buying calls against the falling month-on-month trend. Speculative funds and perpetual traders, however, are leaning the other way, and the split sets up the next move.

IMF Warns the Oil Price Sits Above Its Growth Baseline

The case for higher oil prices starts with supply. The International Monetary Fund flagged that the global oil price sits about 3% above the level built into its April growth forecast, a gap it traces to the Iran conflict.

That risk centers on the Strait of Hormuz, the route for about a fifth of global oil flows. The price path now turns on whether the waterway fully reopens.

Rising energy costs are showing up in business surveys. The ISM Services Prices index, a gauge of input costs across the service economy, rose to 71.3 in May from 70.7 in April, its highest reading since August 2022.

Survey respondents named diesel, gasoline, and oil among the items rising in price, the first month panelists tied petroleum directly to higher costs. No commodities were reported as falling.

The Kobeissi Letter noted the index has climbed 8.3 points since February and argued the trend points to CPI inflation possibly rising above 5%, up from 3.8% in April. Services prices have historically led consumer prices by about three months.

Here the buying turns contrarian. Even as the oil price fell 13% on the month, options traders moved against the trend and loaded up on upside bets.

The put-call ratio for the United States Brent Oil Fund (BNO), which weighs bearish puts against bullish calls, dropped to 0.06 on volume and 0.11 on open interest as of June 4. Both sit well below the May 26 readings of 0.12 and 0.15.

A falling ratio means fewer downside puts per call. This is a quiet vote that the Iran premium and inflation surge will lift prices. The move is easy to miss because it runs beneath a falling monthly price.

Over that week, these traders cut oil longs by 1,703 and added 6,145 shorts. They deepened the bearish bet even as the price rose in the weekly timeframe.

Commercial traders moved the opposite way. These hedgers, often read as the smart money, added 4,319 longs and trimmed 907 shorts, buying into the dip in the same direction as the call buyers. Their move backs the inflation-driven bull case the options market is pricing.

Perpetual traders look undecided. The Hyperliquid funding rate for the Brent oil-USDC pair, a fee that signals whether longs or shorts dominate, sits near neutral at -0.0013% on the 30-day view after a sharp negative swing faded.

That hesitation and a slightly negative tilt reflects a real ceiling. Venezuela’s crude exports surged 61% year over year to 1.25 million barrels per day in May. It is the highest in seven years, as eased US sanctions added fresh barrels and capped how far the bulls can run.

Why It Matters

The IMF estimates Iran-related disruptions have cut roughly 14 million barrels per day of production. It also expects global oil reserves to fall to a five-year low near 7.5 billion barrels in July, down from 8 billion before the war.

The latest Commitments of Traders report from the CFTC, dated May 26, shows speculative funds positioned the opposite way. Non-commercial traders held about 58,110 long contracts against 90,924 short, a net short stance.

Details

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The same supply squeeze is already feeding the next pressure point, which is US inflation.

Hot Services Inflation Strengthens the Bull Case

That options conviction, however, clashes with what the larger futures players are doing.

The Catch: Speculative Shorts and Flat Funding