By Michael Kitchen, MarketWatch LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) — Benchmark U.S. crude-oil futures slipped in electronic trading Wednesday, giving back about half of their gain from the Tuesday floor session, after data showing an unexpected rise in crude stocks. Crude for September delivery CLU2 -0.30% traded down 0.4%, or 36 cents, at $93.07 a barrel, paring the 70-cent advance during a regular New York Mercantile Exchange session Tuesday. Read more on Tuesday’s oil trade. After the Nymex close, the American Petroleum Institute reported a surprise 2.8 million-barrel gain in inventories, confounding expectations for a 1.5 million-barrel drop indicated in a Platts survey of analysts. Read more on crude inventory data. The API data often serve as a preview of data from the Department of Energy, which are generally seen as more definitive and were due out later Wednesday. Better-than-expected U.S. retail sales numbers and economic growth statistics out of Europe had helped Tuesday’s advance, and analysts at Citi Futures said they saw “a willingness to react to bullish framing against what are quite low expectations to begin with as reflecting ... a bullish market sentiment.� Wednesday’s losses sent the benchmark crude contract below what Citi saw as an attractive selling price. “We recommend using a sell stop at $91.30 as the entry [to a short position] and a buy stop at $95.30 to cap the risk,� they said. The API data also showed a fall of 2.3 million barrels in gasoline stockpiles, helping support the September gasoline contract RBU2 +0.37% , which was little changed at $3 a gallon. Other key energy futures followed crude lower, however, with September heating oil HOU2 +0.08% down 0.3% to $3.03 a gallon, and natural gas for September delivery NGU2 -1.09% also down 0.3% to $2.83 per million British thermal units. Michael Kitchen is Asia editor for MarketWatch and is based in Los Angeles.

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