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A .333 batting average may be top-drawer performance in baseball, but it's not so hot when prognosticating petroleum inventories. Ahead of the holiday-delayed government inventory report, the American Petroleum Institute released its estimates for crude oil, gasoline and distillate fuel supplies. When the government numbers were released this morning, only one of three API forecasts were on target.

Forecasting changes in weekly oil inventories can be a dicey business. Sometimes the estimates made by the industry-supported American Petroleum Institute and sell-side analysts are widely disparate; sometimes they coincide. And sometimes, like this week, they can be on either side of the numbers posted by the U.S. Energy Department.

Real-time Monetary Inflation (last 12 months): 3.2%

Have you ever seen Costco customers wrestle with their overflowing carts and wondered, where are they going to store all that stuff? You don't have to ponder such things when you queue up to purchase Costco's petrol. Pretty much everybody's buying gasoline a tankful at a time, no matter how cheap it is.

We often mention spreads in Desktop articles as trading alternatives to outright positions or as indicators of market trends. Because these spreads pit futures contracts against one another, however, many readers can't make use of them as investments.

Nearby crude oil futures climbed to nearly $74 a barrel in overnight trading after an industry report showed U.S. supplies were likely to decline. The drawdown predicted by the American Petroleum Institute surprised traders, fostering optimism about increasing domestic fuel demand.

Crude oil futures climbed further in overnight trading after rising nearly 2 percent in the Tuesday NYMEX floor session. Buoyed by outside influences, oil prices were also driven by the release of bullish industry data.

Spot crude oil traded above $71 a barrel following yesterday's American Petroleum Institute (API) report estimating a 254,000-barrel decline in domestic supplies. The API forecast put the trade group at odds with a call by Street analysts for a buildup of 2 million to 2.2 million barrels in U.S. oil inventories.

Gasoline's been sucked out of storage according to the latest government figures. But, first things first ...

October crude oil was slightly higher overnight after Wednesday's price action ticked above the contract's four- and 10-day moving averages. The market was buoyed, in part, by an upward revision in the International Energy Agency's demand forecast. The agency's new estimates are based upon stronger-than-expected U.S. and Asian fuel consumption.