By V. Phani Kumar, MarketWatch
HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — Crude-oil prices bounced off multi-week lows in electronic trading Wednesday, as an increase in U.S. equity futures after Alcoa Inc.’s earnings report aided buying despite worries about European sovereign troubles and rising inventories.
May futures for light, sweet crude-oil CLK2 +0.26% rose 25 cents, or 0.3%, to $101.27 a barrel during Asian business hours.
The front-month futures tumbled $1.44 in a regular session on the New York Mercantile Exchange overnight, ending at the lowest for the most-actively traded contract since February.
Lending support to the energy complex, Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA -1.65% futures climbed 35 points, or 0.3%, to 12,715 and Standard & Poor’s 500 Index SPX -1.71% futures added 4.60 points, or 0.3%, to 1,361.70 in electronic trade. Read about the overnight performance on Wall Street.
U.S. equities suffered their biggest decline of 2012 on Tuesday, after a steep sell-off in Europe, where Spanish and Italian government bonds tumbled to lift the nations’ borrowing costs. Read more about the rise in Spanish, Italian bonds.
The ICE dollar index DXY -0.12% fell from 79.875 in late North American trade to 79.831 in Asia, also providing a lift to the commodity.
The advance for oil came although data released by the American Petroleum Institute on Tuesday showed U.S. supplies rose by 6.58 million barrels in the week ended April 6. The rise was more than three times the 1.8 million barrel increase expected in an analyst poll by Platts. Read more about the increase in supplies.
Elsewhere in the energy complex, trading in the May natural-gas futures NGK12 +0.30% was choppy, with the contract barely up 0.1% at $2.03 per million British thermal units after another continuing to trend lower Tuesday.
May gasoline RBK2 -0.29% futures fell 0.2% to $3.24 per gallon, while heating-oil HOK2 +0.08% for delivery next month climbed 0.1% to $3.10 per gallon.
Varahabhotla Phani Kumar is a reporter in MarketWatch's Hong Kong bureau.
