Financial planners typically suggest investors should avoid checking their retirement accounts too often — especially when the market is jumpy — but that can be hard for some individuals, especially if they’re not comfortable with investing or they’re close to their retirement years. Losses can — or at least appear to — lower the chances of sustaining retirement security.   

See:The omicron panic is overdone. Buy the dips in these stocks, says JPMorgan

Here are a few things you can do if you’re within a decade or so of retirement and can’t stomach the volatility: 

Check your asset allocation

During a downturn is not usually the time to make changes to your investment portfolio, but if a slight tick downward is causing excessive stress, it can be a good time to check your asset allocation and how it aligns with your risk tolerance. 

Risk tolerance and risk capacity are two very separate, but important, concepts when making a portfolio. The first relates to the risk someone is comfortable having in their accounts — for example, someone who goes to the Las Vegas casinos and doesn’t mind major losses at the blackjack table has a high risk tolerance — whereas risk capacity is tied to how much risk a portfolio can or should allow for to meet the individual’s goals. The two are not always in sync, and people who are worried about their portfolios should talk to a financial planner who can help adjust the portfolio during the appropriate moment, or find ways to accept the ups and downs. 

“Everyone is different and good investment strategies need to account for this,” said Howard Pressman, a certified financial planner and partner at EBW Financial Planning. “The last 10 years or so have lured investors into a false sense of comfort and many people who are not suited for aggressive investing portfolios are, in fact, invested this way.” 

Consider the bucket strategy 

A financial planner takes into account all income streams expected in retirement, and implements a strategy for investments that encompasses risk tolerance as well. “For example, we find out how much predictable income the client will have such as Social Security and pension income, what their expenditures are for both fixed and discretionary expenses and then invest accordingly,” said Michelle Gessner, a certified financial planner and founder of Gessner Wealth Strategies. 

Read: Is a bucket strategy superior to the 4% rule?

Then she breaks it down further: living expenses in the short-term, such as the next two years, have the most conservative investment strategy of all the assets; living expenses between years 3 and 5 have a “more moderate strategy” and everything else is more aggressive, which will help fuel long-term needs. 

“When the market dips, our clients are not worried, because they know that markets recover in two to three years (or less) and they have money that is conservatively invested that they can use while they wait it out,” she said. “This strategy helps our clients avoid making mistakes caused by unnecessary anxiety.” 

Some advisers have also suggested having a year or two’s worth of living expenses in cash, which is easily accessible and allows investments to remain untouched completely during volatility. Other advisers use more than three buckets when investing retirement assets. 

Remove yourself from easy access 

Most retirement investors, especially those who don’t need to access the money immediately, should avoid checking their accounts too frequently. Make it as difficult as possible to check all the time, said Paul Fenner, a certified financial planner and founder of Tamma Capital. “Remove apps from their phones, remove websites from their favorites,” he said. “Anything that takes an extra step or two to access their accounts, individuals may feel like it’s not worth the effort.” 

Also see: The happiest retirees have at least $500,000, this financial adviser said. Here’s what readers had to say about that

Make a plan for when to check your accounts 

Changing perspectives can also help people worried about their retirement savings during downturns. 

“Some of the stress comes from looking at things with the wrong level of ‘zoom,’” said Jennifer Grant, a certified financial planner at Perryman Financial Advisory. “When you invest in the market, are you looking at it on a daily, weekly or monthly time frame? When you make a plan, are you reviewing it on a weekly, monthly or yearly time frame?” How often one checks on a goal should match the duration to reaching that goal, she said. “If you are planning for a vacation, then you need to review your budget daily or weekly,” Grant said. “When you are planning for retirement that will start when you are 65 and last 35 years, this requires a different zoom level.” 

Keep perspective of the losses 

Seeing any losses when logging in is unpleasant, but assess what that loss means in the big picture. “Losing $10,000 in a month sounds like a lot of money, unless you have a $1 million portfolio and then it is 1%. Will a 1% cause you to not be able to retire on time?” Grant said. “I think this is where people close to retirement really feel pain. Their accounts are close to the maximum they will ever be before they start taking funds from them to live on.” 

Go into investing and volatility with reasonable expectations and guidelines for when to review portfolios. 

Investors may associate losses with big-ticket purchases, such as losing a certain amount of money that they could have spent on a new car. 

“They could also make that much money, but that is not as memorable,” Grant said. “Over the course of their adult life, they know how much effort it takes to buy a new car and to think they could lose it that quickly is hard. This is where perspective and zoom level come in.” 

The U.S. central bank last month began winding down an economic-stimulus strategy that involves buying billions of dollars of bonds each month to keep interest rates low. The Fed had been planning to end the program by June.

Yet Bostic and an increasing number of other Fed officials, including Chairman Jerome Powell, have indicated they might end the program even sooner, perhaps by the end of March.

Bostic said he was not prepared for now to consider raising interest rates before the bond-buying program came to an end.

“It is good for us to do one thing at a time,” he said.

Bostic was among the first senior Fed officials to recognize that the current spike in inflation was worse than the central bank originally believed.

Inflation has jumped 6.2% in the past 12 months — the fastest pace in 31 years — based on the consumer price index. Prices have risen 5% in the same span using the Fed’s preferred PCE price gauge.

The Atlanta Fed president in October was the first senior Fed official to say the central bank to should junk the use of the word “transitory” to describe the surge in inflation this year. Powell followed suit a month later.

Bostic is worried inflation will persist longer and remain higher than the Fed has been forecasting.

The longer the current bout of high inflation persists, Bostic said, the bigger the danger that consumers and businesses will come to expect higher inflation.

If inflation doesn’t subside quick enough next year, “it might be appropriate for us to pull forward a lift-off,” he said, referring to an increase in interest rates.

The Fed has kept a key short-term interest rate near zero early in the pandemic.

The one big caveat: The emergence of the omicron strain of the coronavirus. Bostic said he will be watching omicron closely to see what effect it has on the economy.

“Hard to say. We are very much in the early stages,” he said when asked about how much economic damage it could cause.

Bostic is a voting member this year of the Fed’s interest-rate setting Federal Open Market Committee.

He is also reportedly being considered by the Biden administration for an open seat on the Fed board in Washington, but Bostic said he has not had any conversations with the White House so far.

I’m coming back to this topic because he raises a very good issue — and because Congress is considering slamming the Roth IRA door closed for good for upper-middle-class earners. So we might only have a few months to make this big financial decision, which could have an outsized effect on how much money we have in retirement.

Obvious first point: The math is complicated, and if in doubt you should talk to a financial adviser.

But in very broad-brush terms, there are two simple principles that the reader raises.

First, if you are superbullish on the investment outlook, and you think stocks are going to boom for the rest of your working life, then the math says you should lean toward the Roth. Better to pay a small amount of tax now than the vast sums you’ll owe on your millions down the line.

Second, if you expect to be paying a similar marginal tax rate in retirement to the one you are paying now, you should also lean toward the Roth.

On the other hand, if you don’t share these two assumptions, it isn’t so clear.

The reader illustrated his point by imagining someone in the 24% federal tax bracket while working and the 22% tax bracket in retirement, and who earns 8% a year on average on his or her investments. By the time that person reaches retirement age, my reader points out, the tax owed on a traditional IRA will vastly exceed the amount they’d have paid over the years if they’d contributed to a Roth instead. The tax bill could be many times higher. 

He’s right. But I’m nervous about these assumptions.

Do I think I’m going to earn 8% a year over the long term on my investments? As we are using real, constant dollars in these assumptions, that means: Do I think I’m going to earn 8% a year in “real,” or after-inflation, terms?

See: Should I roll my Roth 401(k) into a Roth IRA?

My gloomy take: Dream on.

The long-term real average on U.S. stocks has been around 6%, and even to get to that number we have to include the skyrocketing returns of the last 40 years. My problem with including all the returns from 1980 is not that they haven’t occurred, but whether they’re going to occur again over the next 40. People on Wall Street use many Greek letters, extravagant calculations and incomprehensible economese to explain why the more expensive stocks get, the better their future returns, but they don’t make any sense to me. Isn’t this double counting? Stocks in relation to underlying fundamentals are much, much more expensive than they were 40 years ago. Doesn’t that mean their future long-term returns are likely to be lower?

I’m also wary of thinking I’m going to be paying the same income-tax rate in retirement as I do while I’m working. I’m expecting to be earning less from my investments than I do as a worker bee. I may also move to a lower-tax state. Many upper-middle-class earners are currently paying state taxes as well as federal, and some, such as those in New York City, are paying a city tax as well.

Seems to me, I’d only have to worry about that as a major issue if my retirement plans are loaded by the time I retire — and in that case I’m not so worried about the taxes. My real concern isn’t with how much I pay in tax, but how much I’m going to have left on which to retire. My worry is about paying extra taxes now, at high marginal rates, and then having to tighten my belt when I’m in my 80s (if I get there).

One of the things I like about traditional IRAs is that they will only hit me with a big tax bill in retirement if I’m doing pretty well.

Then there is the final worry, as I mentioned in my previous column, that if I volunteer to pay additional taxes now to convert a traditional IRA into a Roth, what’s to stop a future Congress from taxing that money again — couched, naturally, not as double taxation but as a “crackdown” on “loopholes.”

Maybe I’m being too cynical.

One thing that Roth IRAs have going for them is that they effectively involve making a greater annual contribution to your IRA. With a traditional IRA you can contribute up to $6,000, or $7,000 if you’ve over 49. But some of that money has to be set aside effectively to pay for the taxes you’ll owe when you withdraw the money.

With a Roth, you have already paid those future taxes, so you are in effect contributing more. Someone in a 24% federal tax bracket who contributes $6,000 to a Roth IRA (using a backdoor Roth or conversion) is actually contributing about $8,000 gross, because they’re first paying about $2,000 tax on the money.

So maybe I should bite the bullet. And put some trust in the stock market and Congress. (Cue laughter.)

Of course it would be really, really helpful if the powers that be could arrange for another financial panic between now and Christmas, so we could all convert our traditional IRAs to Roths at depressed values and save on the taxes. Looking at the MarketWatch home page I see the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
+1.74%
down about 1,500 points since the middle of August and the S&P 500
SPY,
+1.28%
off 5% in a month. So maybe this discounting is in the works. How thoughtful!

Read on: How to decide whether to invest in a 401(k), a Roth 401(k) or a Roth IRA

The bill “prohibits all employee after-tax contributions in qualified plans and prohibits after-tax IRA contributions from being converted to Roth regardless of income level, effective for distributions, transfers, and contributions made after Dec. 31, 2021,” reports the House Ways & Means Committee.

This clause is in addition to the separate steps being taken to crack down on IRAs and Roth IRAs for millionaires, billionaires and those making more than $400,000 a year.

Don’t miss: About 156 people have at least $25 million in their Roth IRAs — each

Also: Peter Thiel’s $5 billion Roth IRA moves Congress to consider changes to investment account’s rules

More: How Peter Thiel turned $2,000 in a Roth IRA into $5,000,000,000

President Joe Biden promised in his successful election campaign not to raise taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year (or $450,000 a year if married and filing a joint return). Technically you could argue this change still meets the promise, because it’s not the imposition of a tax; it’s … er … the ending of a tax break. 

Incidentally, the bill also, separately, ends a practice known as a “backdoor Roth” that was allowing high earners to get around income limits for IRA contributions.

David Bussolotta, a trusts and estates partner at the Connecticut law firm Pullman & Comley, says the general theme of the bill when it comes to retirement planning is to try to close loopholes used by high earners. However, he adds, it looks like the law may also close some loopholes — inadvertently or not — for those who are on more middle-class incomes. The ending of Roth conversions is one example, he says.

There are two kinds of IRAs: traditional and Roth. In a traditional IRA, you get to contribute with untaxed dollars — you can deduct the contribution from your taxable income for the year — but you have to pay tax when the money comes out. In a Roth, it’s the other way round: You contribute using taxed dollars, but the money coming out is completely untaxed. Maximum IRA contributions are $6,000 per person per year, plus another $1,000 a year if you’re 50 or older.

Until now, those with money in traditional IRAs could convert them to Roths if they paid tax. So if, say, you have accumulated $50,000 in a traditional IRA, you could add that $50,000 to your taxable income for the year, pay income tax on it, and convert it to a Roth. There wouldn’t be any more tax to pay in the future.

This move by Congress, if it stays in the bill, has major implications. It means that they will effectively end IRA tax breaks for most people making more than about $140,000 if single (or $208,000 if married and filing jointly).

In any year you hit those limits, you won’t be able to get any tax break on an IRA at all. You’ll be earning too much to pay into the traditional IRA. You’ll be making too much to pay into a Roth IRA. And you will no longer have the third option, which is paying into a so-called nondeductible traditional IRA, which is an IRA with no tax break going in or coming out, and then immediately doing a Roth conversion — the “backdoor Roth.”

Retirement Hacks: How to invest in a Roth IRA like — and unlike — PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel

There are wrinkles and caveats, as is always the case with the U.S. tax code. The main one: If you are over these income limits, but neither you nor your spouse is covered by a 401(k) or other retirement plan at work, you will still be eligible for a tax break on your IRA contributions.

So far it doesn’t look is if lawmakers are going after Roth 401(k) plans, where you contribute to your company’s retirement plan using after-tax dollars and avoid future taxes. Stay tuned.

Should you rush and do that conversion while you still can? Maybe. Everyone’s tax situation is different, and many may find it’s worth it.

I’ve never been as big a fan of Roth IRAs and Roth conversions as the conventional wisdom in the financial-planning business. Yes, OK, Roths have a couple of advantages over traditional IRAs. For example, the IRS doesn’t require you to take taxable distributions from a Roth IRA after age 72, which it does with traditional IRAs.

But, overall, I’ve always figured I’m probably going to be paying a much lower income-tax rate in retirement than I am while I’m working. So why would I want to pay a higher tax rate upfront so I can avoid paying a lower rate in a couple of decades’ time?

Furthermore, I always figure that Job 1 of my retirement savings isn’t to make me rich (that’s Job 2) but to make sure I’m not poor. With a traditional IRA, you don’t pay tax on the money going in — and if you’re in dire straits in your golden years you don’t pay much or any tax on the money coming out, either. How dumb am I going to feel if I volunteer to pay more income tax today, and then find myself hard up when I’m 80?

This may sound crazy, but there’s another reason I am wary of Roth IRAs: I don’t trust politicians. Of either stripe. (You could say I don’t trust voters.) I could pay tax on the money upfront expecting to get my money tax-free in 30 years’ time, only to find out I’m getting taxed a second time because, well, the government wants my money.

Naturally it wouldn’t be calling that malevolent double taxation. It would be calling it “cracking down” on a “loophole.”

At least with my 401(k) and any traditional IRA money, I can’t be taxed twice because I haven’t yet been taxed once.

Retirement Hacks: When you should — and shouldn’t — invest in a Roth 401(k)

“We suspect the market is effectively pricing concerns over the Omicron coronavirus variant and potential influence on the economy and sports, an inflation impact on economic growth and consumer discretionary spend, and a recent hawkish pivot from the Federal Reserve that includes and accelerated view on interest rate increases, which can have an exaggerated impact on high-multiple growth companies,” Hickey wrote in a research note to clients.

The stock had surged as much as 4.2% in intraday trading before paring gains to be up 0.5% in midday trading.

DraftKings’ stock has tumbled 34.1% in the past month to close Wednesday at the lowest price since July 2020, and has lost about half its value since it closed at five-month high of $63.67 on Sept. 9. In comparison, the Russell 2000
RUT,
+1.59%
index of small-capitalization stocks has dropped 7.4% in the past month while the S&P 500 index
SPX,
+1.14%
has slipped 1.7%.

The stock’s selloff was helped along after the company reported on Nov. 5 a wider-than-expected third-quarter loss and revenue that came up short of forecasts.

The stock was still up 79% since April 23, 2020, when DraftKings’ merger with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) closed, to effectively take DraftKings public.

Read more: Here are 5 things to know about DraftKings, after it went public and fetched a $6 billion market cap.

Benchmark’s Hickey said while he remained “attentive” to the potential impact from the omicron variant, he is reminded of the initial COVID influence last year, which delivered “a meaningful increase” in user engagement, accelerated new betting opportunities and helped drive positive regulatory momentum toward the legalization of sports betting.

The stock has declined 32.6% this year, after rocketing 335.1% in 2021, while the S&P 500 has rallied 21.2% this year after advancing 16.3% last year.

Enacted in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the RFS promised to enhance energy security, cut carbon dioxide emissions and boost income for rural America. The program has certainly raised profits for portions of the agricultural industry, but in my view it has failed to fulfill its other promises. Indeed, studies by some scientists, including me, find that biofuel use has increased rather than decreased CO2 emissions to date.

Current law sets a target of producing and using 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022 as part of the roughly 200 billion gallons of motor fuel that U.S. motor vehicles burn each year. As of 2019, drivers were using only 20 billion gallons of renewable fuels yearly – mainly corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel. Usage declined in 2020 because of the pandemic, as did most energy use. Although the 2021 tally is not yet complete, the program remains far from its 36 billion-gallon goal.

I believe the time is ripe to repeal the RFS, or at least greatly scale it back.

Higher profits for many farmers

The RFS’s clearest success has been boosting income for corn and soybean farmers and related agricultural firms. It also has built up a sizable domestic biofuel industry.

The Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group for the biofuels industry, estimates that the RFS has generated over 300,000 jobs in recent years. Two-thirds of these jobs are in the top ethanol-producing states: Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana and South Dakota. Given Iowa’s key role in presidential primaries, most politicians with national ambitions find it prudent to embrace biofuels.

The RFS displaces a modest amount of petroleum, shifting some income away from the oil industry and into agribusiness. Nevertheless, biofuels’ contribution to U.S. energy security pales compared with gains from expanded domestic oil production through hydraulic fracturing – which of course brings its own severe environmental damages. And using ethanol in fuel poses other risks, including damage to small engines and higher emissions from fuel fumes.

For consumers, biofuel use has had a varying, but overall small, effect on pump prices. Renewable fuel policy has little leverage in the world oil market, where the biofuel mandate’s penny-level effects are no match for oil’s dollar-scale volatility.

Biofuels are not carbon-neutral

The idea that biofuels are good for the environment rests on the assumption that they are inherently carbon neutral – meaning that the CO2 emitted when biofuels are burned is fully offset by the CO2 that feedstocks like corn and soybeans absorb as they grow. This assumption is coded into computer models used to evaluate fuels.

Leading up to passage of the RFS, such modeling found modest CO2 reductions for corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel. It promised greater benefits from cellulosic ethanol – a more advanced type of biofuel that would be made from nonfood sources, such as crop residues and energy crops like willow and switchgrass.

But subsequent research has shown that biofuels are not actually carbon-neutral. Correcting this mistake by evaluating real-world changes in cropland carbon uptake reveals that biofuel use has increased CO2 emissions.

One big factor is that making biofuels amplifies land-use change. As harvests are diverted from feeding humans and livestock to produce fuel, additional farmland is needed to compensate. That means forests are cut down and prairies are plowed up  to carve out new acres for crop production, triggering very large CO2 releases.

Expanding farmland for biofuel production is also bad for the environment in other ways. Studies show that it has reduced the abundance and diversity of plants and animals worldwide. In the U.S., it has amplified other adverse impacts of industrial agriculture, such as nutrient runoff and water pollution.The failure of cellulosic ethanol

When Congress expanded the biofuel mandate in 2007, a key factor that induced legislators from states outside the Midwest to support it was the belief that a coming generation of cellulosic ethanol would produce even greater environmental, energy and economic benefits. Biofuel proponents claimed that cellulosic fuels were close to becoming commercially viable.

Almost 15 years later, in spite of the mandate and billions of dollars in federal support, cellulosic ethanol has flopped. Total production of liquid cellulosic biofuels has recently hovered around 10 million gallons per year – a tiny fraction of the 16 billion gallons that the RFS calls for producing in 2022. Technical challenges have proved to be more daunting than proponents claimed.

Environmentally speaking, I see the cellulosic failure as a relief. If the technology were to succeed, I believe it would likely unleash an even more aggressive global expansion of industrial agriculture – large-scale farms that raise only one or two crops and rely on highly mechanized methods with intensive chemical fertilizer and pesticide use. Some such risk remains as petroleum refiners invest in bio-based diesel production and producers modify corn ethanol facilities to produce biojet fuel.Ripple effects on lands and Indigenous people

Today the vast majority of biofuels are made from crops like corn and soybeans that also are used for food and animal feed. Global markets for major commodity crops are closely coupled, so increased demand for biofuel production drives up their prices globally.

This price pressure amplifies deforestation and land-grabbing in locations from Brazil to Thailand. The Renewable Fuel Standard thus aggravates displacement of Indigenous communities, destruction of peatlands and similar harms along agricultural frontiers worldwide, mainly in developing countries.

Some researchers have found that adverse effects of biofuel production on land use, crop prices and climate are much smaller than previously estimated. Nevertheless, the uncertainties surrounding land use change and net effects on CO2 emissions are enormous. The complex modeling of biofuel-related commodity markets and land utilization is impossible to verify, as it extrapolates effects across the globe and into the future.

Rather than biofuels, a much better way to address transportation-related CO2 emissions is through improving efficiency, particularly raising gasoline vehicle fuel economy while electric cars continue to advance.

A stool with two weak legs

What can we conclude from 16 years of the RFS? As I see it, two of its three policy legs are now quite wobbly: Its energy security rationale is largely moot, and its climate rationale has proved false.

Nevertheless, key agricultural interests strongly support the program and may be able to prop it up indefinitely. Indeed, as some commentators have observed, the biofuel mandate has become another agribusiness entitlement. Taxpayers probably would have to pay dearly in a deal to repeal the RFS. For the sake of the planet, it would be a cost worth paying.

John DeCicco is a research professor emeritus at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This was first published by The Conversation — “The US biofuel mandate helps farmers, but does little for energy security and harms the environment.”

The move “appears to be a way of leaving the door open for a change to output quotas before the next meeting in early January,” he said in a note following the announcement.

In its statement, OPEC+ said it reconfirmed its production adjustment plan and raise monthly overall production by 400,000 barrels per day in January 2022, but it also said that members agreed that the “meeting shall remain in session pending further developments of the pandemic and continue to monitor the market closely and make immediate adjustments if required.”

Stacey Morris, director of research at index provider Alerian, said the statement “gives OPEC+ the flexibility to adjust their plans if market conditions warrant it.”

“The statement reads somewhat like a hedge for their decision — they’re proceeding as planned but have let the door open to adjust their plans as needed,” she told MarketWatch.

OPEC+ also extended its “compensation period” until the end of June 2022. Countries that have produced oil above their quota are required to make up for that overproduction.

“This gives countries that have been ahead of their production quotas, like Iraq, more time to compensate for over production,” said Rebecca Babin, senior energy trader at CIBC Private Wealth US. “This makes sense as many of the countries in OPEC+ have missed production targets and the group as a whole has not met it production increase targets.”

OPEC+ had faced a difficult decision, against a backdrop of the recently discovered omicron variant of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The spread of the variant would threaten economic activity and, in turn, demand for oil.

The
undefined
of the variant on Wednesday. That came a day after Moderna’s
MRNA,
-4.54%
Chief Executive Stéphane Bancel told the Financial Times that existing vaccines will likely be less effective against the omicron variant.

Still, while there is “uncertainty in the market around the omicron variant, fundamentals have arguably not changed as much as price action may suggest,” said Morris. The demand impact from omicron is still “unclear.”

At its last meeting in early November, OPEC+ didn’t accelerate plans to gradually lift oil production, as some had expected, given growing signs of tighter inventories. It agreed to raise monthly overall production by 400,000 barrels per day in December, matching the output agreement put in place for November.

Meanwhile, last month the U.S. announced plans to release 50 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in coordination with reserve releases from other major oil-consuming nations, in an effort to help reduce retail gasoline prices.

Strategic releases are “not going to have a lasting effect on prices,” said Morris. “The focus now is really on the potential implications for demand from the omicron variant, especially if we start to see increased restrictions.”

Talks with world powers on the Iran nuclear deal were also held last month in what a Russian ambassador described in a tweet as starting “quite successfully.” Most analysts and traders alike don’t expect a deal to revive the 2015 agreement, aimed at restricting Iran’s nuclear program, to be reached soon, but a deal would likely lead to sanctions relief for Iran, allowing the nation to add more oil to global supplies.

The changes in news headlines over the past week have heavily weighed on oil prices, contributing to a nearly 21% November drop in U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate prices
CLF22,
+1.57%

CL.1,
+1.57%,
following a gain of more than 12% in October. Global benchmark Brent crude
BRNG22,
+1.23%
fell more than 16% last month.

In Thursday dealings, however, oil prices pared early losses, then turned higher following the OPEC+ decision.

January WTI crude was up $1.01, or 1.5%, at $66.58 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after trading as low as $62.43. February Brent crude traded at $69.82 a barrel, up 95 cents, or 1.4%.

The OPEC+ move “either shows confidence that global demand is a lot better than the market thinks, or it’s a sign that they did not want to get into a diplomatic situation with the Biden administration,” Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at The Price Futures Group, told MarketWatch.

He believes the agreement to raise production shows that they are “confident” that the omicron variant will “have little lasting impact on demand.”