Investing.com - Will crude stockpiles get another reprieve tomorrow from a seasonal hike?
Prices of West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark for New York-traded crude, and London’s Brent, the global gauge for oil, were little changed on Tuesday as traders awaited industry data due after the market’s close on U.S. crude inventories for the week ended Oct. 25. In the previous week, a crude drawdown contrary to seasonal trends boosted prices.
WTI settled down 27 cents, or 0.5%, at $55.54 per barrel.
Brent had an even more anemic day, closing the regular New York trading session up by just 2 cents at $61.59.
In Monday’s New York trade, oil prices settled down for the first time in five days, with WTI losing 1.5% and Brent 0.7 %.
“Talk of low runs and exports that may have been delayed due to weather are increasing some expectations of a large crude oil build, yet there are whisper numbers suggesting another crude draw,” said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at the Price Futures Group in Chicago.
The American Petroleum Institute (API) will issue at 4:30 PM ET a snapshot of what the Energy Information Administration (EIA) will likely report as official petroleum supply-demand balances for last week. Analysts surveyed by Investing.com think crude stockpiles may have risen by as much as 494,000 barrels for the week.
In the previous week to Oct. 18, the API’s snapshot suggested a crude build even larger than the 2.2 million barrels that analysts expected in the EIA report. In the end, the official number was a drawdown of 1.7 million barrels.
Oil prices were also dampened on Tuesday by lower demand growth for 2019 and 2020 anticipated by the International Energy Agency (IEA).
While noting that demand rose by 800,000 barrels a day in July and 1.4 million barrels a day in August, the IEA has lowered its forecast for demand growth in 2019 by 100,000 barrels per day to around 1 million bpd and reduced its forecast for 2020 by the same amount to 1.2 million bpd.