Crude oil prices started to rise again and finished the week with moderate increases; Brent oil price added 1.06% to its value, and WTI spot oil inclined by 3.86%, resulting in the spread between Brent oil and WTI oil reaching $18.65/b.
Let’s review the changes during last week (July 18th to July 22nd) of crude oil prices (Brent oil and WTI), and present a summary of the recent EIA petroleum report:
Crude oil prices – highlights
WTI spot oil price inclined during last week by 3.86%; its weekly average price rose by 1.36% as it reached $98.02 per barrel, compared with last week’s $96.72 per barrel. The average daily percent change of crude oil price (WTI) was 0.49%.
NYMEX Futures Price (August delivery) inclined by 4.11% during the week, and reached $99.87/b on Friday, July 22nd. The contango between the short term future price and WTI spot oil reached $0.23/b.
Brent spot oil price also inclined by 1.06% during the week, while the average price nearly didn’t change as it rose by only 0.09% compared with previous week’s average.
The difference between the Brent and WTI spot prices moderately declined during the week and averaged at $19.80; it finished the week at $18.65.
The high gap between Brent oil and WTI spot oil might suggest that the European oil market is still tighter than in the U.S. oil market; furthermore, it also suggest that the release of 60 million crude oil barrels by IEA , didn’t help much in bringing down the supply-demand friction in Europe.
Crude oil charts
The following chart shows last week’s trend of WTI spot oil price, NYMEX Futures Prices (August delivery) and Europe Brent spot oil price:
The chart shows that both Brent spot oil price and WTI spot oil didn’t change much during the week with a very moderate upward trend.
The second chart presents the daily percent changes (i.e. changes around the trend) of crude oil price (WTI spot oil, WTI future, Brent spot oil):
As seen above, WTI spot oil and Brent oil zigzagged during the week: they have started the week with sharp changes, but during the second half of the week their daily percent changes moderated.
Petroleum Stocks –highlights:
In last week’s EIA report of the US petroleum and oil market, the U.S. Petroleum and oil stocks inclined during last week by 3.8 million barrels. For the week ending on July 14th crude oil stocks reached 1,800 million barrels – the highest stockpiles level since February 4th, 2011.
The chart below shows the upward trend since the end of April of petroleum and oil stocks on the one hand, and the downward trend of WTI spot oil price on the other.
For the complete petroleum stocks review see here.
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