Hard to say.
I’ve read a lot about John Paulson, who made billions betting against subprime mortgages. He had a math savvy research guy (Paolo Pellegrini) who accessed a lot of data bases on the performance of mortgages, and drew conclusions that others either missed or were afraid to act on.
The oil stats seem similar, that there isn’t really “magic” data known only to insiders. But inertia is a powerful thing and it takes guts to bet against the herd.
I must admit, looking with hind sight at the Non-OPEC supply versus global demand growths from the Summer EIA short-term energy reports, I have to wonder why wasn’t anybody talking about the constant more supply than demand growth, for nearly a year.
But I look at those things every single month and never gave it a second thought at the time, or even months later. I did not really click to that until December, HEY, there WAS a sign....
They put the two on the same chart with a couple years of quarterly summaries. I never read anyone talking about them at the time.