Fueling Strategy: Please partial fill only tonight, Saturday AM wholesale prices will fall 6 cents – Be Safe Tonight

NYMEX Crude $ 46.22 UP $.7000
NY Harbor ULSD $1.4366 UP $.0243
NYMEX Gasoline $1.5046 UP $.0234

NEWS
Oil futures ended higher Friday, bouncing back a bit from a nearly 5% drop a day earlier, but prices still registered a hefty loss for the week. This week, “the market sent the bulls into the barn while the bears raided the honey tree,” said James Williams, energy economist at WTRG Economics.

June West Texas Intermediate crude rose 70 cents, or 1.5%, to settle at $46.22 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. After losing 4.8% on Thursday, prices finished roughly 6.3% lower for the week, according to Fact Set data. July Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures exchange added 72 cents, or 1.5%, to $49.10 a barrel. Prices for the global benchmark also fell 4.8% Thursday, and they ended down by about 5.6% for the week.

WTI and Brent crude settled Thursday at their lowest levels since late November, when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed to cut output for six months. Oil has suffered “heavy losses this week as investors are no longer pleased with current output cuts by OPEC,” said Naeem Aslam, chief market analyst at Think Markets. “Under the current output cut, the shale oil producers pumped more oil and this hasn’t helped the oil glut,” he said. U.S. production has “increased consistently for eleven weeks, which marked the longest run of gains since 2012.” Aslam pointed out that a number of technical indicators are “giving oversold signals, which could provide a catalyst for the current sell-off to pause or bounce back a little before it continues its steep downward move again.” Prices sold off on Thursday, as easing tensions in Libya lessened the risk of disruptions to oil production in the country and Reuters reported that OPEC members aren’t interested in deepening the current cuts.

Meanwhile, an S&P Global Platts survey released Friday, showed that crude output from the 10 OPEC members who agreed to cut production was unchanged in April at 31.85 million barrels a day, compared with a month earlier. Under the pact, OPEC had agreed to cap output at 32.5 million barrels a day. OPEC plans to make a decision on a possible extension of the output cuts at its meeting on May 25. But the current production cuts haven’t yet made a dent in robust global inventories, partly because they prompted U.S. shale producers to pump more.

Have a great day,

Loren R. Bailey, President
FUEL MANAGER SERVICES INC
“Serving the Trucking Industry Since 1992”