Brent settled 52 cents lower on Friday at 89.18 dollars a barrel and WTI fell 1.01 dollars to 82.52 dollars. Over the week Brent lost 5.5 per cent and WTI 5.2 per cent. What surprised the market was extra crude moving through the Strait of Hormuz on an Iran-Oman corridor together with volume opened by US mine clearance work. CFTC data showed money managers lifting gasoline futures longs against the weekly crude decline.
Brent settled 52 cents lower on Friday, a 0.6 per cent fall that put it at 89.18 dollars a barrel. WTI dropped 1.01 dollars, or 1.2 per cent, to 82.52 dollars. Over the week Brent lost 5.5 per cent and WTI 5.2 per cent.[1]
What surprised the market was the extra crude moving through the Strait of Hormuz on an Iran-Oman corridor, together with the volume opened up by US mine clearance work. Slow progress in the US-Iran talks was not enough to hold prices up. Commodity vessel transits through the strait stayed volatile: 7 on the reporting day against 17 the day before and a ten-day average of 15.[1]
The CFTC's Friday commitments report shows money managers' long position in RBOB gasoline futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange up 6,107 contracts to 92,717 as of 25 August. Short positions in the same category rose 536 contracts to 13,065. The gap between longs and shorts widened to 79,652 contracts, a direction that runs against the weekly fall in crude.[2]
