Oil Logs A Loss After Three Days of Gains

Oil futures settled with a loss on Wednesday, putting an end to three sessions of gains as weekly data showed a hefty jump in U.S. crude supplies, according to Bloomberg MarketWatch.

Prices finished off the session’s lows, finding support from declines in domestic oil output and gasoline stockpiles. Traders also weighed expectations for a production freeze at Sunday’s OPEC meeting among key global oil producers in Qatar.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, May West Texas Intermediate crude settled at $41.76 a barrel, down 41 cents, or 1%. It was trading lower at around $41.65 right before the supply data.

June Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures Exchange fell 51 cents, or 1.1%, to $44.18 a barrel.

Early Wednesday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a 6.6 million barrel climb in crude oil supplies for the week ended April 8, That topped the 6.2 million barrel increase reported by the American Petroleum Institute, and was more than six times higher than the climb of 1 million barrels expected by analysts.

But the data also revealed that domestic oil production fell 8.977 million barrels a day, down 31,000 from a week earlier.

May natural gas ended at $2.036 per million British thermal units, up 3.2 cents, or 1.6%, ahead of the market’s supply update Thursday.

Oil futures had rallied Tuesday to the highest settlement of the year on speculation that Saudi Arabia and Russia have reached a deal to stabilize production.