Crude oil prices fell yesterday, bringing falls since last Thursday to about 8 per cent, as hedge funds have reduced their exposure to crude futures following a sharp jump in prices since OPECannounced production cuts on September 24th.<\/p>\n
IPE Brent for December delivery was 30 cents lower at $28.76 a barrel in late London trading, extending Friday’s 97 cent slide but off its intra-day low of $28.05. The November Nymex WTI contract was 23 cents lower at $30.50 a barrel in early afternoon New York trading, but off its low for the day of $29.72 a barrel.<\/p>\n
Crude futures rose more than 20 per cent to the peaks of last week following OPEC’s surprise announcement, a move investors now say was too far and too fast.<\/p>\n
The three-week ascent in oil prices ran into resistance on Thursday last week when US crude inventories were shown to have risen by a larger than expected amount.<\/p>\n
This in turn eased fears about the relatively low level of crude inventories.<\/p>\n
Oil traders said the sharp fall in crude futures over the past two days had reflected hedge-fund selling. “Funds are now selling after a period of short covering following the OPEC cut, which caught everyone off guard,” said one London-based oil trader.<\/p>\n
“Funds are now trying to consolidate, but I think we are likely to trend lower over the coming days, unless there is some surprise on the supply side,” he said.<\/p>\n
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the industry regulator, showed total speculative positions in Nymex crude futures had switched from a small net short position, which usually indicates that prices are expected to fall, to a sizeable net long position, an indication that investors expect prices to rise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Crude oil prices fell yesterday, bringing falls since last Thursday to about 8 per cent, as hedge funds have reduced their exposure to crude futures following a sharp jump in prices since OPECannounced production cuts on September 24th. IPE Brent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hedgeco-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}