MW: Oil bounces after inventories, as U.S. stocks rise
Better-than-expected results for Alcoa buoys markets
By Claudia Assis and V. Phani Kumar, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Crude-oil prices bounced off multi-week lows Wednesday, riding a wave of optimism as investors cheered Alcoa Inc.’s better-than-expected earnings and an inventories report was tame compared to previous ones.
Crude for May delivery CLK2 +1.35% rose 95 cents, or 0.9%, to $101.96 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Futures added to gains after the weekly government inventories report. It had traded at $101.02 a barrel moments before the data release.
The Energy Information Administration said crude supplies rose by 2.8 million barrels on the week ended April 6.
That compares to expectations of a rise of 1.8 million barrels in the week, and comes after two weeks of huge increases that derailed futures markets.
The EIA also reported gasoline supplies declined 4.3 million barrels, and inventories of distillates, which include heating oil, were down 4 million barrels.
The analysts surveyed by Platts had expected gasoline supplies to drop 1.25 million barrels, and distillates supplies to increase 200,000 barrels.
May gasoline RBK2 +0.98% turned higher, recently up a penny to $3.26 per gallon, while heating oil HOK2 +1.00% for the same month climbed 2 cents to $3.11 per gallon.
Concerns about European sovereign troubles kept gains in check.
Oil tumbled 1.4% on Tuesday, ending at the lowest since February for the second day in a row.
Lending support to the energy complex, Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA +0.73% climbed 93 points, or 0.7%, to trade at 12,809, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index SPX +0.86% added 12 points, or 0.9%, to 1,371.
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 -0.13% fell from 79.875 in late North American trade to 79.612, or 0.3%, also providing a lift to oil and other commodities.
May natural-gas futures NGK12 -0.74% returned to the red, hovering at 10-year lows. The contract declined less than 1 cent at $2.02 per million British thermal units after settling at a decade-low on Tuesday.
Claudia Assis is a San Francisco-based reporter for MarketWatch.
Varahabhotla Phani Kumar is a reporter in MarketWatch's Hong Kong bureau.
