Crude ends marginally higher

Crude prices rise more than 4% for the week

Crude oil prices rose on Friday, 08 January 2010. Prices rose as dollar slipped following disappointing job data at Wall Street thereby enhancing the appeal of commodities as an alternate investment. But crude managed to end only marginally higher.

On Friday, crude-oil futures for light sweet crude for February delivery closed at $82.75/barrel (higher by $0.09 or 0.1%). Earlier during the day, prices fell to a low of $82.55. Crude ended the week, higher by 4.3%.

Crude ended FY 2009 higher by 78%, the highest yearly gain since 1999. It reached a high of $82 earlier in October 2009 and hit a low of $33.98 on 12 February 2009. Oil prices had reached a high of $147 on 11 July, 2008 but have dropped almost 44% since then. Crude prices had ended FY 2008 lower by 54%, the largest yearly loss since trading began at Nymex.

In the currency market on Friday, the dollar index, which weighs the strength of dollar against the basket of six other currencies fell by almost 0.7%.

Among economic data for the day, The Labor Department in US reported on Friday, 08 January, 2010 that nonfarm payrolls fell by a seasonally adjusted 85,000 in December 2009 following a revised 4,000 gain in November 2009, which was the first increase in payrolls since December 2007. During 2009, payrolls fell by 4.2 million.

The official unemployment rate remained at 10% in December as the labor force contracted by the largest amount in nearly 15 years. After averaging nearly 700,000 a month in the first quarter of 2009, job losses decelerated to an average of 69,000 in the fourth quarter.

Among other energy products on Friday, February gasoline rose 1% to $2.1553 a gallon and February heating oil gained 0.8% to $2.2003 a gallon.

Also on Friday, February natural gas lost 1% to $5.749 per million British thermal units.