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The title is missing a key bit. A better title might be, "Why the oil price in US dollars and the US dollar are negatively correlated."

But then the answer to that is too obvious to bother writing about, so I guess the article tries to obfuscate it.

Naturally, for anything where the US is not the dominant producer, its price in dollars will correlate negatively with the value of dollars. Oil isn't special.

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The point is definitely true of all US-dollar commodities (which is basically every commodity price out there). I wrote the article, actually, in response to a question from a reader of our email who was confused when I wrote: "commodities are priced in US dollars, so their price goes down as the US dollar goes up." I had initially thought perhaps that this concept was, as you say, more obvious than it actually appears to be for many people.

Original article & question is here: http://beta.finimize.com/general/too-much-oil-copper-too-lit...

Well, it's clearly not fair to accuse you of being deliberately obtuse when it was prompted by a question like that!

Anyway, thanks for the context.

:) To be fair to the person, we bill ourselves as a simple email-based daily read of the financial news (hence the Q&A function for when we're not as simple as we'd like)

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