The most commonly used industry statistics say “rising.”

However, an article in last Thursday’s Financial Times says the opposite.

The difference?

The FT’s assertion is that official statistics emphasize what’s happening in the US, because data there are plentiful.  And in the US, thanks to the resurgence of shale oil production, inventories are indeed rising.  On the other hand, the FT reports that it has data from a startup that tracks by satellite oil tanker movements around the world, which seem to demonstrate that the international flow of oil by tanker is down by at least 16% year on year during 1Q17.

Tankers move about 40% of the 90+million barrels of crude brought to the surface globally each day.  So the startup’s data implies that worldwide shipments are down by about 6 million daily barrels.  In other words, supply is now running about 4 million daily barrels below demand–but we can’t see that because the shortfall is mostly occurring in Asia, where publicly available data are poor.

If the startup information is correct, I see two investment implications (neither of which I’m ready to bet the farm on, though developments will be interesting to watch):

–the global crude oil supply/demand situation is slowly tightening, contrary to consensus beliefs, and

–in a world where few, if any, experienced oil industry securities analysts are working for brokers, and where instead algorithms parsing public data are becoming the norm, it may take a long time for the market to realize that tightening is going on.

It will be potentially important to monitor:  (1) whether what the FT is reporting proves to be correct; (2) if so, how long a lag there will be from FT publication last week to market awareness; and (3) whether the market reaction will be ho-hum or a powerful upward movement in oil stocks.  If this is indeed a non-consensus view, and I think it is< then the latter is more likely, I think, than the former.

This situation may shed some light not only on the oil market but also on how the discounting mechanism may be changing on Wall Street.