Commodity Daily News

Oil Weakens before Inventories Report

Crude oil prices fell for the 5th time in six days on Tuesday, amid high oil inventories and the Federal Reserve's continued concern about the sluggish economic recovery. Oil prices failed to garner any support from a weak dollar, which can lift dollar-denominated crude oil prices because it makes the commodity less expensive in countries using currencies other than the greenback.

An analyst survey ahead of the API report had yielded a forecast for crude inventories to be down 1.9 million barrels last week because of lower imports from Canada. This is largely due to the Enbridge pipeline outage and the stormy weather that hindered oil tankers navigation. Oil traders are now waiting for the first glimpse of the prior week's crude inventories. The U.S. Energy Information Administration will release its oil inventory data on Wednesday at 14:30 GMT. An increase in inventories is expected, which if true, would likely pull prices further down.