Oil rises in year-end sprint as Bulls bets on 2022 trip to Investing.com

Author: Barani Krishnan

Investing.com – Crude oil prices rose on Monday, extending last week’s rally in a final push for 2021 in betting on next year’s travel, despite Covid’s variants continuing to threaten oil consumption.

But lower-than-usual trading volumes — due to the large number of market participants on holiday — could have led to fluctuating price action over the last four days of the year.

Covid holders ’on-off points can also disrupt the mood.

During Asian trading hours on Monday, the U.S. crude West Texas Intermediate or WTI benchmark fell 0.5%, reacting to the U.S. holiday Christmas due to bad weather and new Covid infections using the Omicron variant.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said on Monday that it was investigating reports of Covid cases on board.

“Smaller travel equals lower economic activity in the U.S. The lower the WTI, the U.S. oil benchmark,” said Jeffrey Halley, a Sydney-based analyst at the OANDA online trading platform.

“The moment has been silenced, and I doubt a story will have a lasting impact on oil prices,” Halley added. “The story of the global recovery for 2022 is still well under way. The disruption of goods and services to isolate workers, especially air travel, seems to have been the main consequence so far. This can only affect short-term nerves.”

At 13:30 ET (18:30 GMT), it rose $ 1.91 or 2.6% per barrel to $ 75.70 after hitting a session low of $ 72.58. Last week, the U.S. crude benchmark rose 4%. Year-on-year, WTI shows a 56% profit.

In London’s trade, the global benchmark for oil rose $ 2.57 or 3.4% a day to $ 78.36 a barrel. Brent also rose about 4% last week and up 51% year-on-year.

These long-term crude also led OPEC + oil producers to opt for positive market intervention, which was scheduled for a monthly meeting next week.

At its last meeting earlier this month, OPEC + maintained plans to add 400,000 barrels a day from January, despite the rise in the Omicron case.

Omicron was first detected in November and now accounts for nearly three-quarters and 90% of U.S. cases in certain areas, such as the East Coast. The average number of new coronavirus cases in the U.S. rose 45% to 179,000 a day last week, according to a Reuters count.

Although research suggests that Omicron is less deadly than the original Covid-19 strain that erupted in March 2020 – and even the Delta variant that spread earlier this year – few are putting themselves at risk when they are in contact or in contact. contaminate.

But many people are also denying calls for precaution or taking calculated risks because virus vaccines and promoters remain readily available and new treatments, such as the world’s first COVID pill. Pfizer (NYSE 🙂 – accepted on the day.