Oil prices show moderate growth on Monday morning after a strong rise last week.
The value of May futures for Brent on London’s ICE Futures Exchange stood at $75.12 a barrel by 8:07 a.m., $0.13 (0.17%) above the previous session’s closing price. At the close of trading last Friday those contracts fell by $0.92 (1.2%) to $74.99 per barrel.
The price of WTI futures for May at the electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) is $69.4 per barrel by that time, which is $0.14 (0.2%) above the final value of the previous session. The contract fell by $0.7 per barrel to $69.26 last Friday.
Brent gained 2.8% and WTI gained 3.5% last week, slightly recovering from a collapse to multi-year lows a week earlier.
“Oil prices, largely a victim of volatility in global markets, managed to recover in the short term, although Brent is still worth 10% less than it was at the beginning of the year,” said Barbara Lambrecht, a commodities analyst at Commerzbank. – On the one hand, this is due to still high risks and on the other hand to unexpectedly high supply levels.”
Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management pointed to good indicators on the Chinese economy and predicted that the oil market may show a small deficit by mid-year.
Meanwhile, the number of active oil rigs in the U.S. rose 4 units to 593 last week, oil services company Baker Hughes said. The week before, the figure fell to a nine-month low.
