Energy

Crude Inventories See Small Gain (OIH, USO, OIL)

Last week’s draw-down in crude oil is not being mirrored this week.  We just saw the weekly Department of Energy  inventories and the reading came to a gain of 128,000 barrels of crude oil to 343.76 million barrels.  This is…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published August 26, 2009, 10:47am ET · 1 min read

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Last week’s draw-down in crude oil is not being mirrored this week.  We just saw the weekly Department of Energy  inventories and the reading came to a gain of 128,000 barrels of crude oil to 343.76 million barrels.  This is a small gain on the surface but a gain still.  We had penciled in a level of roughly 500,00, but as a draw-down rather than an increase. We have been watching the Oil Services HOLDRs (NYSE: OIH), the United States Oil (NYSE: USO) ETF and the iPath S&P GSCI Crude Oil Total Return Index ETN (NYSE: OIL) react to this news.

Gasoline stocks did decline by 1.7 million barrels to an inventory of about 208 million barrels.  We were looking for a draw-down there of only about 1 million barrels.  Distillates rose by 767,000 barrels to 162.38 million barrels.

The real notion to watch after the crude figure is the refining capacity, and that rose slightly.  We saw that refining capacity was running at 84.1%, up from 84.0% a week ago.

At 10:40 AM EST NYMEX WTI Crude is $0.80 at $71.25 per barrel.  The Oil Services HOLDRs (NYSE: OIH) is down 0.3%at $107.76, the United States Oil (NYSE: USO) ETF is down 0.9% at $36.82 and the iPath S&P GSCI Crude Oil Total Return Index ETN (NYSE: OIL) is down 1% at $23.34.

JON C. OGG
August 26, 2009

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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