The history of commodity markets is littered with exceptionally poor forecasts of oil prices, including one bad forecast of my own. I should have known better and remembered where Italian poet Dante Alighieri placed the diviners, astrologers and others with enough audacity to attempt predictions of the future: in the eighth circle of hell, with their heads turned backwards and tears flowing down their backs.

Forecasting oil prices is a losing game because we are dealing with a very complex and