After last week's surprise crude build, expectations were for a draw once again and API delivered with a bigger than expected draw of 3.16mm barrels, which sent WTI/RBOB prices higher.

“What we’ve been seeing in the crude stock numbers is increased volatility,” said Bill O’Grady, chief market strategist at Confluence Investment Management LLC in St. Louis. “The reality is this is high gasoline demand season. They’re going to keep refineries operating pretty strongly until after Labor Day.”

API

• Crude -3.16mm (-3.1mm exp)

• Cushing -808k (-900k exp)

• Gasoline -4.87mm

• Distillates -1.32mm

After last week's shock build, API reports a more seasonally-'normal' draw, but inventories fell across all cohorts...

“The basic backdrop is bullish,” Jeff Currie, head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said in a Bloomberg television interview. Still, “the market’s rotating back and forth, between being slightly balanced, slightly in a surplus, slightly in a deficit.”

WTI/RBOB roundtripped a lot of the day's gains into the close and flatlined into the API print and then jumped on the bigger than expected draw...

“The market seems to be obsessed with the idea that there’s oversupply, for whatever reason, and so financial investors have rushed to the exits,” said Carsten Fritsch, an analyst at Commerzbank AG in Frankfurt.