
Ask HN: Why Oil prices are going down? - known
Is there anything forthcoming disruptive beyond demand&#x2F;supply&#x2F;distribution?
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ChuckMcM
Three things influence the price of oil, supplies, geopolitical
tension/policy, demand. Most recently having Iran able to sell oil again has
increased supply (downward pressure), Saudia Arabia has been under increasing
political tension (tends to cause oil prices to go up), and programs to curb
greenhouse emissions and vehicle mileage standards have pushed down demand.

/disclosure - I work at IBM and know these guys ...

While this is just standard "what's going on in the world" sort of stuff, if
you want to put a different tech spin on it you can use the AlchemyNews API
from IBM Watson and use it to highlight stories related to news producers,
regions, or changes in demand. That will give you a more comprehensive sense
of what is going on in the market.

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atomical
How would the AlchemyNews API be better than searching Google News?

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ChuckMcM
Two simple ones, the AlchemyAPI News product is a crawler/flagging system so
you don't have to write a web scraper to pull results of Google News. The
second being that it's processing concepts, keywords, and entities so you can
catch stories that mention the movers and shakers in the space without a giant
regex.

That said, being well read and subscribing to a number of news sources is a
solid way of keeping up to date on a topic you're interested in. There are few
short cuts that are as effective as that.

~~~
atomical
The OP didn't ask for a web scraping solution. Using Google Alerts would work
just as well.

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baccredited
I don't really track this but think I heard that OPEC was threatened by the
amount of fracking-based oil that was starting to reach the market and decided
to put a major squeeze on the producers of that source of oil. I'm not sure if
it is working.

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/low-oil-prices-threatening-
frack...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/low-oil-prices-threatening-fracking-
industry/)

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Jugurtha
One interesting fact is that gasoline price in Algeria was increased. It has
always been subsidised (20 cents/liter or something). Now diesel/gasoline, etc
are almost double by Government decision.

