Home/Commodities/Newsfeed

Oil Falls Before US Inventory Report Tomorrow

Share Print 0

West Texas Intermediate oil fell for the sixth time in seven days amid forecasts that U.S. refineries reduced operating rates last week, allowing crude supplies at Cushing, Oklahoma, to rebound from near six-year lows.

Refineries probably operated at 92.8 percent of capacity on Aug. 1, down 0.7 percentage point from the prior week, according to a Bloomberg survey before a government report tomorrow. The announcement last week that a Kansas refinery that gets oil from Cushing may be offline for most of August sent WTI to a four-month low. Brent slipped on reports that Kurdish fighters in Iraq retook border towns seized by Islamic militants.

“We’re all anxious about tomorrow’s data,” said Bob Yawger, director of the futures division at Mizuho Securities USA Inc. in New York. “WTI has been supported by the fall in Cushing supplies this year. Coffeyville being offline may change the whole formula and we may see a supply gain.”

WTI for September delivery dropped 30 cents to $97.99 a barrel at 9:39 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Futures touched $97.09 on Aug. 1, the lowest intraday level since Feb. 5. The volume of all futures traded was 30 percent below the 100-day average. Prices are little changed this year.

Brent for September settlement slipped 47 cents, or 0.5 percent, to $104.94 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. The European benchmark crude traded at a $6.92 premium to WTI, down from $7.12 yesterday.

via Bloomberg

Content is for general information purposes only. It is not investment advice or a solution to buy or sell securities. Opinions are the authors; not necessarily that of OANDA Business Information & Services, Inc. or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, officers or directors. If you would like to reproduce or redistribute any of the content found on MarketPulse, an award winning forex, commodities and global indices analysis and news site service produced by OANDA Business Information & Services, Inc., please access the RSS feed or contact us at info@marketpulse.com. Visit https://www.marketpulse.com/ to find out more about the beat of the global markets. © 2023 OANDA Business Information & Services Inc.

Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza

@alfonso_forex

Back to Top