Commodities: Hurricane Nate not seen strengthening to Category 2, WTI drops
By Alexander Bueso
Date: Sunday 08 Oct 2017
(ShareCast News) - Weakness in the energy patch weighed on the entire commodities complex at the end of the week amid forecasts that hurricane Nate was unlikely to go beyond a category one storm.
Those forecasts saw front month West Texas Intermediate futures fall 2.95% to $49.29 a barrel on NYMEX last Friday, alongside a 3.26% fall in the November gasoline contract to $1.5588 a gallon.
Natural gas and heating oil futures saw similar-sized drops.
On a more prudent note nevertheless, analysts at Barclays cautioned against underestimating the risk of refinery outages, as the Louisiana Gulf Coast accounted for 3.7m barrels a day of capacity.
"High winds and coastal flooding could cause damage to refineries and result in shut-ins. Recent forecasts, however, suggest that Nate will track east of Lake Charles, Krotz Springs, and Baton Rouge, which serve as injection points for the Colonial pipeline," they said.
Some precious metals meanwhile bounced back, as the US dollar spot index dipped 0.17% to 98.8.
Thus, December silver on COMEX rose 0.91% to $16.79/oz., although gold futures inched up by just 0.13% to $1,274.90/oz..
Base metals futures were almost uniformly lower in LME trading on Friday, save for nickel.
For its part, three-month copper futures ended at $6,667 a metric tonne, versus the prior day's close of $6,692.
In agriculturals, December 2017 corn on the CBoT was up by 0.14% to $3.50 a bushel, while similarly dated wheat advanced 0.62% to $4.4350 a bushel.
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