Hello, and welcome back to CantosCharts. I'm David Jones from spread betting company, IG Index. And today, to wrap things up for this week, I thought we'd take a look at the price of crude oil.

It's been a really strange year for the oil price but, again, taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, it was of course the beginning of 2009 that we saw the price of crude oil weaken to below $35 a barrel. And then for much of 2009 we saw the price of crude recover. And by the end of last year it was trading back up around about $80 a barrel.

That strength did continue, but you can see from just the year so far, if we step forward, it's been mainly one of very wide sideways moves. Yes, we have seen the price of crude punch out to fresh recovery highs earlier this year in April. But then we saw a fairly big reversal into May, with crude oil slipping back down briefly below $70 a barrel.

I do think overall the long-term trend for crude is still up, so longer term we should expect further gains to the upside for crude. And, of course, a big factor here is going to be how healthy the economic recoveries continue to be, continue to push up the demand for crude oil. But overall the trend for crude is still up.

But the move we've seen over the last couple of days or so has pushed the price of crude back up to what had been a big problem area earlier this year. Up in April/early May we saw the price of crude rally up to about $87 a barrel and then reverse fairly sharply. We've hit this sort of area again in the last couple of days, so if the price of crude is going to drop from anywhere, we're here now. Maybe it's a market that's got slightly ahead of itself. Again, for those of you who like things like RSIs, trying to signal when the market's got a little bit overheated, it hasn't done too bad a job, the RSI, down here of suggesting when it's got a bit too over-extended on the upside.

So in the short I think the risk for crude oil is maybe a slip back down to the more recent levels of around about $80 a barrel. But I think, as ever, there's got to be a caveat to this. I think if we do see crude oil push through $88, it does suggest that finally this sideways trend that we've been in for much of this year is over and we start looking for higher targets in the short term. Medium to long term the trend is still up, but I think at the moment, based on the charts, the risk is we could see some weakness for crude oil from these somewhat elevated levels. We'll see what the next few days bring.

That's it from me for this week for CantosCharts. I hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to talking to you again at some point in the future.