Fueling Strategy: Please fill as needed today/tonight, Wholesale prices will go up less than 1/2 Friday AM, Be Safe Today!

NYMEX Crude $ 38.34 UP $.0200
NY Harbor ULSD $1.1848 UP $.0251
NYMEX Gasoline $1.4136 DN $.0099

NEWS
Oil futures edged higher on Thursday, with prices ending the month of March nearly 14% higher—their best monthly performance in almost a year. “The biggest reasons for oil’s recent strength has been a combination of short covering, dollar weakness and hopes of a production freeze,” said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at ClipperData. “The likelihood of these scenarios unraveling going forward is pretty high, hence so is a selloff.”

West Texas Intermediate crude oil for May tacked on 2 cents to settle at $38.34 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices, based on the most-active contracts, were about 13.5% higher for the month, according to FactSet data. That was the largest monthly climb since April 2015. Prices were up about 3.5% for the first quarter of the year. On its expiration day, May Brent added 34 cents, or 0.9%, to $39.60 a barrel on London’s ICE Futures exchange. Prices were roughly 8% higher for the quarter, based on the most-active contracts.

Thursday’s move follows U.S. crude-supply data out on Wednesday that showed a 2.3-million-barrel weekly rise in stockpiles. It marked a seventh straight weekly climb to a near-record high of 534.8 million barrels, but the increase was smaller than some market forecasts. So “behind that number, there are more signs that we are going to, at some point, change the trend of rising supply,” said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group.

Oil prices managed to barely break a five-session losing streak Wednesday, on the back of a fall in weekly U.S. crude production. Oil prices have rebounded in recent weeks since their lows below $30 a barrel earlier this year following weeks of declines in U.S. output and expectations that major producers will agree to supply limits at an April 17 meeting in Qatar. “The looming mid-April supply meeting is having some impact and we’ll have to wait until the latter stages of the month to see what came out of that,” Matthew Parry, senior oil analyst at the International Energy Agency, told MarketWatch.