CURRENT:
First a correction! I wrote yesterday that:
I did wonder at the time why the API release was not also shifted one day, but that was what the calendar said so I believed it! 
But it is actually now on the calendar for tonight at 20.30 GMT.
Generally, commentary seems to be split 50/50 on whether we are going up or down from here. Last week’s bullish impact from a small drop in US output and a first drop in US oil rig count for 23 weeks is based on only one week’s data points, but if these are repeated in the EIA release on Thurs and the rig count on Fri then we will see higher values from here. And…if we dont, we won’t! ha ha! 
The limited power of my small brain cell can only deduce that these figures only showed a possible baseline in effective value rather than reason for a continuing rise in price. And that was already at some 500 pips ($5/barrel) below where we are now. Brent is already back around the $50 range.
The underlying fundamental situation has not changed. There is still a global oil glut that is far above the 5-year average that OPEC wants to return to, various countries are still ramping up their production levles which is diluting the OPEC/NOPEC cuts in production, demand levels are still rather weak, OPEC members themselves are also showing strains within the compliance requirement, and OPEC itself is becoming entangled in other non-oil issues.
And on top of that, we are now right in the middle of a perceived range of lower US40’s to upper US50’s…
Conclusion? Thank goodness for technical analysis! We don’t need to decide for ourselves - let’s just see what the majority of everyone else is doing instead!
My charts (obviously) show the market in a bull trend and that excludes any thought of selling right now. My only concern is how much potential is still left on the upside. So I am trading long off the 15m chart for whatever I can get rather than sitting with a long position.
I have simplified what I show on my chart but also added, at this stage, experimentally, the Ichimoku cloud. This is a throwback to an earlier stage in my charting and somehow it got dropped along the way. At that time I was day-trading EURUSD and on a 15 min TF and it wasn’t very useful. But when applied to the Daily, 4H and 1H oil charts it does seem to give some “structure” to them, even if not used for the actual trading signals. Right now the 4H and 1H look like this:
Since I also trade the same “triple screen”, MTF approach, which is the basis of the popular 3 ducks trading system (found here), I have also added the 60-period SMA in blue dot-dash for comparative interest…
High-5 trade:
Entry: 44.42, stop: 43.605 (low from 28.6.) Current position at close 4.7.: +263 (47.05)