Bulls vs Bears

Baseball player Yogi Berra once succinctly observed, “Prediction is a risky business, especially when it’s about the future.” It used to be much easier to predict the tanker market direction when rates hovered in the $10,000/day range as they did for most of the 1980s and early 1990s. With rates over the past 18 months ranging from $15,000/day to over $120,000/day, the task is much more difficult. Shown below is the week-on- week Timecharter equivalent (TCE) daily earnings for VLCCs trading from the Arabian Gulf to the Far East.