LONDON (ShareCast) - (ShareCast News) - Crude-oil futures soared ahead on Thursday amid overall cautious trade after shrugging off the sell-off it experienced earlier this week on the back of hefty rises in US inventories.
At 15:16 GMT, Nymex-priced West Texas Intermediate crude was up 1.26% to $53.00 a barrel, followed by a 0.94% surge in Intercontinental Exchange-traded Brent to $55.64 a barrel.

"Clearly it's going to take more than a large inventory build to seriously test these lows," said OANDA senior market analyst Craig Erlam.

He was referring to data from American Petroleum Institute and US Energy Information Administration (EIA), which separately revealed a huge crude inventory build over the past week.

These data also sparked searching questions on whether OPEC-led production cuts would fully address the global glut of the black liquid.

"The re-emergence of US shale oil as prices have rebounded from their lows appears to be offsetting the cuts apparently being imposed as part of the production cut deal and questions are also surfacing about whether demand growth is as strong as expected," said Erlam.

Monex Europe also cited Wednesday's news of a fall in gasoline inventories -- down 869,000 barrels last week to 256.2m barrels, according to EIA. A 1.1m barrel gain was expected. A fall in gasoline stocks is bearish for crude.

Meantime, Comex-quoted metals were mixed. Gold fell 0.11% to $1238.10 an ounce, while silver rose 0.14% to $17.73 an ounce and copper firmed 0.06% to 266.80 cents a pound.

Three-month industrial metals on London Metals Exchange were much firmer. Copper and zinc were up 1.73% and 1.90% respectively, as aluminum added 0.9% and tin rose 0.5%.

"The big story of the week has been the incessant gains for gold, which is taking a breather today," said IG market analyst Joshua Mahony, also noting widespread political uncertainty.

"The impending political headwinds from Holland, France and Germany, alongside the ever present Greece, means there is an increasingly cloudy outlook ahead for traders, as reflected by recent market hesitancy," he added, also referring to the US.

"While this has provided a drag on the likes of (stocks such as) Fresnillo, the current political uncertainty means we will likely see the bulls come back in soon enough."

On the agriculturals front, Chicago Board of Trade-listed corn was down 0.47% to 369.00 cents a bushel, and wheat was flat at 432.50 cents a bushel.

ICE-traded cocoa fell 0.3% to $1987 a MT, and cotton No.2 added 0.19% to 75.39 cents a pound. Live cattle was down 0.04% to 114.70 cents a pound.

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