Brent crude extended previous gains and breached 115 USD per barrel

Brent crude extended previous gains on Wednesday and in intraday trading even breached 115 USD per barrel (USD/bbl) level. Regarding yesterday’s figures, the regular US DOE/EIA report unveiled a built in US crude stockpiles. At the same time, gasoline inventories fell quite sharply as the utilization rate of refineries decreased. Nevertheless, the figure for crude stocks was biased by a release of oil from strategic reserves, which was due to International Energy Agency’s decision to supply 60 millions barrel of oil to the market during the summer.

Base Metals
On Wednesday, copper price remained well supported by bets on the QE3 as well as highly disappointing data on Chile’s copper output in July. According to the official statistics, output of the world’s top copper miner decreased by 18 percent on year-on-year basis, mainly due to strikes and unfavourable weather conditions. Hence, copper posted solid gains in a fourth consecutive session and even flirted with 9300 USD per ton (USD/t) level.
On the other hand, today’s figures on China’s PMI weighs on the price of the red metal today as it showed decreasing pace of new export orders. As a result, copper already erased almost all gains from the previous session and currently is trading just shy of 9150 USD/t.

Precious Metals
Gold has been trading sideways on Wednesday and today in the morning, waiting for today’s and tomorrow’s figures (ISM, payrolls). Clearly, worse global sentiment has supported the price of the metal in recent months. Moreover, increasing likelihood of further monetary easing in the US has played in favour of the price of commodities in general and gold has been no exception.