By Ga-Woon Philip Vahn Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES SINGAPORE (Dow Jones)--Crude-oil futures rose in Asia Friday as risk appetite recovered slightly, with equities and the euro regaining some lost ground, while the region's industrial consumers helped drive up bidding prices. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in January traded at $94.28 a barrel at 0717 GMT, up $0.41 in the Globex electronic session. February Brent crude on London's ICE Futures exchange rose $0.61 to $104.21 a barrel. Investor confidence rose as Asian equities advanced after Wall Street snapped a three-day losing streak Thursday on the back of better-than-expected employment data, while the euro advanced on news that Spain had successfully sold EUR6.028 billion of long-term government debt. Japan's Nikkei Stock Average ended up 0.3%, while Australia's S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.5% and South Korea's Kospi Composite closed 1.1% higher. Market participants said industrial consumers, especially in China, were actively placing buy orders to take advantage of the sharp decline in prices over the past several days. "Portfolio managers prefer to liquidate positions as the year-end approaches, but we are seeing good physical demand, with many Asian industry players looking to stock up at lower prices," a sales manager at S-Oil Corp. in Hong Kong said. Crude is expected to remain within key support and resistance levels in the run-up to the year-end holiday season, after having borne the brunt of a sharp euro decline and geopolitical tensions earlier this week. "We look for the complex to move into a choppy, consolidation phase into the holiday period, as the euro appears to have stabilized for now amid a fresh flow of supportive U.S. economic guidance," energy consultant Ritterbusch and Associates said in a note. Nymex reformulated gasoline blendstock for January--the benchmark gasoline contract--rose 285 points to $2.5162 a gallon, while January heating oil traded at $2.8330, 105 points higher. ICE gasoil for January changed hands at $897.75 a metric ton, down $0.50 from Thursday's settlement. -By Ga-Woon Philip Vahn, Dow Jones Newswires; +65-64154149; philip.vahn@dowjones.com

Source