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To: pz who wrote (24373)	6/18/1998 8:48:00 PM
From: Czechsinthemail	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

6/18/98 Crude-Oil, Products Settle Lower On Nymex As Market Consolidate NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Crude-oil and petroleum-products futures finished broadly lower Thursday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after Wednesday's technical rally made the market a prime target for fresh sellers. July crude oil closed down 83 cents at $11.77 a barrel. August crude oil fell 56 cents at $13.13 a barrel. Among products: July unleaded gasoline finished down 0.67 cent at 45.84 cents a gallon. July heating oil dipped 0.41 cent to end at 36.91 cents a gallon. July natural gas lost 3.0 cents to settle at $2.144 per million BTUs. July crude set off sell-stops when it penetrated support at $12.26. That stretched losses to the intraday low of $11.60, just 18 cents off the near 12-year low hit on Monday. "We had aggressive selling in the morning by a few players, and that was enough to spook buyers out of the market," said Dominick Caglioti, a Nymex floor trader with Energex Ltd. "It doesn't take much to scare buyers, and rightfully so." Another trader said the July contract was hit hardest as speculative players rolled positions out of the contract and into the August contract ahead of July's expiration Monday. Wednesday's rally, which at one point had July crude oil more than $1.12 higher at $13.10, relieved the market of its oversold condition caused by six days of aggressive selling. But with nothing supportive to go on Thursday, the sellers returned. Fresh fundamentals, such as Russia cutting production by 63,000 barrels a day to support a larger output-reduction effort and supportive inventory data, sparked the short covering Wednesday, but weren't enough to justify the sharp gains. "A moderate draw in crude stocks and a dubious Russian output pledge are not the stuff of $1 rallies," said Tim Evans, senior energy analyst with Pegasus Econometric Group, a market research firm. In other news, Iran's deputy oil minister for international affairs, S.M. Hosseini, told Dow Jones in an interview Thursday that world oil prices have bottomed out, therefore it won't be necessary for OPEC at next week's meeting to make additional output cuts beyond those already committed to. OPEC members agreed in March to reduce output by 1.245 million barrels per day, with non-OPEC oil producers contributing about another 400,000 b/d. In the past few weeks, OPEC and non-OPEC countries have said they would reduce output by a total of 803,000 b/d, which include 100,000 b/d from Iran. "The recent meetings by the Iranian oil minister have already produced fruitful results," said Hosseini, adding that he was confident the cutbacks recently announced by both OPEC and non-OPEC members will be carried out from July 1.