Will oil stop at $20?

Oil market cycles tend to bottom at around $20, in today’s prices. Said Source, a leading European provider of exchange-traded funds. Recent estimates suggest the average operating cost has fallen to $20 per barrel in the “high-cost” UK energy sector. The market will not rebalance until the price is below operating cost for a sufficient number of producers. History also suggests those producers will continue to underperform broad market indices as oil falls. 
"There were two surprising events last week – remarks Source in his research – for the first time in my life somebody offered me their seat on public transport (time waits for nobody); the second surprise was that other stock markets ignored Thursday’s 6% slump in Chinese equities (a few weeks ago it would have sent them into a tailspin). Perhaps global markets are moving beyond an obsession with Chinese indices because global real data flows refuse to worsen. Good January data for US retail sales and industrial production was added to by the 4% bounce in core capital goods orders and healthy gains in personal income and spending (note also the bounce in core PCE inflation to 1.7%)”.  
February PMI data has been weak across many countries but these surveys are often impacted by market turmoil (especially given the dramatic media coverage). For instance, it was interesting to note that the decline in the German IFO survey was entirely due to a downgrading of expectations, while the assessment of current conditions actually improved.  “Or perhaps markets ignored China because they are focused on oil. As we recently mentioned, the normal pattern is for equities to rise when oil falls (see this). It was also the case this time, until recently. For whatever reason, global markets currently want a higher oil price. That is unfortunate, because I continue to believe that oil will bottom at around $20, as it has done systematically over the last 150 years, when measured in today’s prices. That history suggests oil may have normalised but has not yet bottomed”, concludes Source.