About Ares Trading Lab
Independent analysis of WTI and Brent. Volume profile tells you where the levels are. Supply, demand and stocks tell you whether they hold.
The market is an auction
Price goes looking for trade. Where both sides agree, volume builds and price sticks. Where one side disappears, price moves fast until it finds the other. The profile shows which prices the market accepted and which it rejected. Everything here is built on that.
Full framework: PoC, value area, HVN/LVN, composites, VWAPs. It's on the method page.
Fundamentals
Levels without a catalyst are just lines. A surprise in US stocks, an OPEC+ decision or a lost cargo is what takes price through a level or rejects it. The fundamentals page tracks:
- US crude stocks, production and exports: EIA weekly.
- WTI positioning: CFTC Commitments of Traders, managed money.
- Global supply and demand: producer groups, countries, OPEC spare capacity, outages. EIA STEO.
Official US government data only. Every figure is sourced.
What gets published
- Daily notes: bias, levels, data risk, setups.
- Weekly outlooks: every Sunday before the open. Macro, the week's data, weekly levels, higher-timeframe setups.
- Trade ideas: one setup when there is one. Zone, stop, targets.
- Fundamentals: updated on each release.
Every post opens with a level board: green buy zones, red sell zones, profile levels as ticks, bronze marker for price at publication.
How a trade idea works
One setup, every number fixed before the fact.
- Posted. Zone, stop, targets and the reasoning, technical and fundamental.
- Open. Price trades into the zone. Entry time logged.
What you won't find here
- Signals to copy. The reasoning is written out. Judge it yourself.
- Tracking. No cookies, ads or pixels. Visits are counted with Cloudflare's cookieless Web Analytics, and fonts are self-hosted. Details in the privacy notice.
- Paywalls, sign-ups, upsells.
Questions
Which prices?
Prices are taken from a CFD feed and can differ from futures prices and from your broker's quotes. Check levels against your own chart.
Which time zone?
London. BST in summer, GMT in winter.
How are the levels built?
See the method page.
Found an error?
Nothing here is financial advice. Trading oil and other leveraged products carries a high risk of loss, and you can lose more than you put in. Read the risk disclaimer before acting on any idea from this site.