RTRS: Oil falls towards $68 after seven strong days
LONDON (Reuters) - The oil markets' seven-day rally dipped on Wednesday ahead of weekly U.S. inventory data and as investors grew more cautious ahead of the $70 mark.
U.S. light, sweet crude was down 40 cents at $68.15 a barrel by 0918 GMT, off an earlier peak of $68.72. ICE Brent crude was down 26 cents at $67.91 a barrel.
U.S. front month crude prices broke above an important 200-day moving average price level last Tuesday, and had closed higher every day since until the last session, when the market finished down 3 cents.
"The strong influence has been the breakout of the 200-day moving average last week, which has brought the market higher ever since," said Olivier Jakob, an oil analyst at Swiss-based PetroMatrix.
"We are very close to this psychological $70 level, and the bulls can afford a slight retracement and still keep their bullish trend," said Jakob.
Investors have held back so far on Wednesday, with oil markets showing light trading volumes, as they await data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration due at 1530 GMT.
The American Petroleum Institute on Tuesday said crude stocks fell 828,000 barrels last week, a smaller decline than 1.4 million barrels expected in a Reuters poll.
"The API numbers suggest we could see similarly subdued readings out of the EIA and potentially weaker prices heading into the Wednesday session," Edward Weir at MF Global in London wrote in a note.
Gasoline supplies rose 99,000 barrels and distillate stocks jumped 3.4 million barrels, the API said, against expectations for a 400,000 barrel build in gasoline and a 1 million barrel rise in distillate stocks.
U.S. gasoline demand during the Memorial Day week, which ended on May 29, rose 2.2 percent from a year earlier to 9 million barrels, a MasterCard SpendingPulse report showed on Tuesday.
