MARKET WATCH: Energy prices continue to slide
Energy prices continued sliding Aug. 5 in the first trading session of the week. The equity market was relatively flat with the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index down 0.2% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average declining 0.3%.
However, analysts in the Houston office of Raymond James & Associates Inc. reported equity prices “continue to hover near record levels as the absence of any significant market-moving news tempers volume, allowing yesterday to be the lightest full-day action of the year. As earnings season winds down (391 of the S&P 500 have already reported), investors will search for new catalysts to move the market.” The SIG Oil Exploration & Production Index and the Oil Service Index finished the day “flattish” as well.
Energy prices
The September contract for benchmark US sweet, light crudes decreased 38¢ to $106.56/bbl Aug. 5 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The October contract declined 34¢ to $105.90/bbl. The Wall Street Journal reported its market source discontinued reporting US spot prices for West Texas Intermediate at Cushing, Okla., effective Aug. 5.
Heating oil for September delivery was down 1.92¢ to $3.08/gal on NYMEX. Reformulated stock for oxygenate blending for the same month lost 4.41¢ to $2.95/gal.
The September natural gas contract retreated 2.8¢ to $3.32/MMbtu on NYMEX. On the US spot market, gas at Henry Hub, La., fell 6.3¢ to $3.33/MMbtu.
In London, the September IPE contract for North Sea Brent decreased 25¢ to $108.70/bbl. Gas oil for August dropped $3.50 to $920.25/tonne.
The average price for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ basket of 12 benchmark crudes was down 22¢ to $106.43/bbl.
Contact Sam Fletcher at [email protected].
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.
