Crude oil steady after rebound

3 March 2010

Written by John King

Crude oil prices were hovering below $80 (£53) a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange this morning (March 3rd), making marginal gains after a rally yesterday.

Both crude and heating oil prices climbed yesterday after the publication of the American Petroleum Institute's demand report, which showed a 4.1 million-barrel drawdown in distillate stocks last week.

However, many traders may wait for corroboration of the drawdown in the upcoming inventories report from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), as the two industry bodies have been known to produce divergent demand figures and the EIA data is generally viewed as more extensive.

A Bloomberg poll revealed a median estimate that the EIA will show 1.28 million-barrel crude drawdown when it releases its data late on Wednesday.

David Moore, a commodity strategist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney, told the news agency: "US inventories are still high, but not as high as they were in the first half of 2009. Markets are becoming a little more optimistic about the international economic outlook."

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