MARKET WATCH: Week ended with crude up, gas down
US floor trading of energy commodities was closed Feb. 18 and President Barack Obama played a semi-secret golf game with Tiger Woods in Florida on the US Presidents’ Day holiday.
Obama went to Palm City, Fla., ahead of a climate rally by thousands of demonstrators Feb. 17 on the National Mall in Washington, DC. According to Frank Maisano, a Washington-based energy and political analyst, estimates of the turnout ranged from 10,000 to 50,000, including Tar Sands Blockade members who have tried to halt construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline and use of hydraulic fracturing.
In Florida, pool reporters covering the president were not informed of Obama’s match with Woods at a private course until too late to observe the game.
Nonetheless, analysts in the Houston office of Raymond James & Associates Inc. reported, “Crude ended the week higher (up 0.7%) in part due to a bullish inventory report, while natural gas retreated (down 3.6%) for the week on a bearish inventory report.”
They said, “The Standard & Poor’s 500 index extended its winning streak…ending last week up modestly despite weak economic readings from the Euro-zone.” The Euro-zone’s gross domestic product for the fourth quarter registered “the sharpest contraction since early 2009, shrinking 0.6%.” However, Raymond James analysts said, “US data points remained largely positive with a sharp fall in weekly unemployment claims and a better-than-expected consumer sentiment reading.” The Oil Service Index increased 1.3% through last week, while the SIG Oil Exploration & Production Index decreased 3.9%.
In other news, the National Association of Home Builders-Wells Fargo builder sentiment index report on Feb. 19 slipped to 46 from 47, its first monthly decline since April and down from a 6½-year high in January after 5 years of stagnation. The price of housing has been rising with fewer previously occupied houses now on the market.
The average price for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ basket of 12 benchmark crudes declined 5¢ to $114.18/bbl.
Contact Sam Fletcher at [email protected].
About the Author
Sam Fletcher
Senior Writer
I'm third-generation blue-collar oil field worker, born in the great East Texas Field and completed high school in the Permian Basin of West Texas where I spent a couple of summers hustling jugs and loading shot holes on seismic crews. My family was oil field trash back when it was an insult instead of a brag on a bumper sticker. I enlisted in the US Army in 1961-1964 looking for a way out of a life of stoop-labor in the oil patch. I didn't succeed then, but a few years later when they passed a new GI Bill for Vietnam veterans, they backdated it to cover my period of enlistment and finally gave me the means to attend college. I'd wanted a career in journalism since my junior year in high school when I was editor of the school newspaper. I financed my college education with the GI bill, parttime work, and a few scholarships and earned a bachelor's degree and later a master's degree in mass communication at Texas Tech University. I worked some years on Texas daily newspapers and even taught journalism a couple of semesters at a junior college in San Antonio before joining the metropolitan Houston Post in 1973. In 1977 I became the energy reporter for the paper, primarily because I was the only writer who'd ever broke a sweat in sight of an oil rig. I covered the oil patch through its biggest boom in the 1970s, its worst depression in the 1980s, and its subsequent rise from the ashes as the industry reinvented itself yet again. When the Post folded in 1995, I made the switch to oil industry publications. At the start of the new century, I joined the Oil & Gas Journal, long the "Bible" of the oil industry. I've been writing about the oil and gas industry's successes and setbacks for a long time, and I've loved every minute of it.