Oil Closes Higher After Reaching $111

Crude oil closed a choppy session higher on Thursday. Light sweet crude for April delivery moved to $110.33, up 41 cents on the session. Oil touched a record $111.00 at around 10:50 a.m. ET before coming back lower.
Weakness in the U.S. dollar continued to push commodity prices higher. The greenback lost significant ground to other majors this morning, adding to its record lows versus the euro and hitting a 12-year low against the yen. Oil soared again on Wednesday as a weakness in the U.S. dollar out-weighed a rise in weekly inventories.
Crude closed at $109.92, up $1.17 on the session. Prices reached as high as $110.20 in the late afternoon, crossing $110 for the first time. Traders continued to consider the weekly inventory report from the Energy Information Administration from Wednesday that showed a much bigger than expected increase in crude oil inventories in the week ended March 7.
The report showed that crude oil inventories increased by 6.2 million barrels after showing an unexpected decrease in the previous week. The increase came in well above analyst estimates of an increase of about 1.6 million barrels. With the increase, crude oil inventories rose to 311.6 million barrels, although they remain in the middle of the average range for this time of year.
Stochastics and the RSI again showed over-bought levels for April oil, which has been trending sharply higher since Feb. 7. If prices turn lower, some support may be found at the 10-day moving average at $105.503. The $111 mark could mark psychological resistance for oil. Natural gas prices were higher following the weekly inventory report.
Prices moved at $10.24, up 22.9 cents on the day. The Department of Energy reported that stockpiles were down 86 billion cubic feet in the recent weekOn the economic front, data released by the Department of Commerce on Thursday revealed that retail sales unexpectedly fell in the month of February, with decreases in auto and gasoline sales contributing to the drop in overall sales. The report showed that retail sales fell 0.6 percent in February following a revised 0.4 percent increase in January.
The decrease came as a surprise to economists, who had expected sales to increase by about 0.2 percent. Also Thursday morning, the Department of Labor released its report on initial jobless claims in the week ended March 8th, showing that jobless claims unexpectedly came in unchanged compared to a revised reading for the previous week.
The report showed that jobless claims came in at 353,000, unchanged from the previous week's revised figure of 353,000. Economists had been expecting jobless claims to edge up to 355,000 from the 351,000 originally reported for the previous week.
In other commodity news, gold touched the $1,000 an ounce mark for the first time in the most actively traded contract on Thursday in U.S. trading. April gold traded at $995.30, up $14.80 on the session. The precious metal first hit the key $1,000 mark at around 8:25 a.m. ET and later reached as high as $1,001.50.


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