Investing.com -- Crude futures staged a dramatic recovery on Monday, paring most of their losses from a sell-off in overnight trading, as investors digested bearish news from Qatar after a group of major producers left a highly-anticipated summit without any deal to limit global output at near-record highs.
On the New York Mercantile Exchange, WTI crude for June delivery traded in a broad range between $39.02 and $41.63 a barrel, before settling at $41.20, down 0.59 or 1.41% on the session. At session-lows, the front month contract for U.S. crude fell more than 5% to extend mild losses from late last week. The June contract closed above $41 a barrel on Monday, one day after the front month contract for WTI rolled over from May to June.
On the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), brent crude for June delivery wavered between $40.58 and $43.41 a barrel, before closing at $42.86, down 0.25 or 0.58% on the session. North Sea crude futures also fell more than $2 a barrel at intraday lows, before nearly erasing all of the losses late in the session. The spread between the U.S. and international benchmarks of crude stood at $1.66, below Friday's level of $2.74 at the close. Both benchmarks are up by more than 35% from multi-year lows in mid-February when WTI crude traded at a 13-year low of $26.05 a barrel.
On Sunday, a closely-watched meeting in Doha between 18 OPEC and Non-OPEC came to a sudden halt when Saudi Arabia demanded that Iran join the group in capping output at January levels. Iranian officials refused to attend the summit, failing to budge from their stance of ramping up production to four million barrels per day, as the Persian Gulf nation strives to return to pre-sanction levels from 2007. The failure of major producers to achieve any progress in curbing a record glut of oversupply revives industry fears that oil prices will remain persistently low in the near-term future.
Crude pared the losses, shortly thereafter following reports that Kuwait output hovered around 1 million barrels per day, as producers took roughly 1.5 million barrels offline in response to a strike of thousands of workers over the weekend. While officials from the Kuwait National Petroleum Co. (KNPC) told the Al-Arabiya television network in Dubai that production lingered around 1.1 million bpd on the first day of strike, they expect it to return to average levels before the end of the week. Prior to the strike, Kuwait production remained around 2.8 million bpd, according to Reuters data.
"We expect a big increase in crude inventory in the coming days and we have enough stocks for export and we have no fears of a stoppage of any shipment," said KNPC deputy chief executive for support services Khaled al-Asousi.
Once Kuwaiti production stabilizes, a number of analysts worry that crude prices could resume their descent back toward $30 a barrel. Last week, net long positions in WTI crude surged by 11%, according to Commitments of Traders from the U.S. Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). At the same time, net short positions fell by 10,500 to 241,100 the data showed. As investors unwind their bullish positions in WTI crude, analysts have expressed concern that oil could fall back to multi-year lows with few signals of a reduction in the global supply glut in sight.
The U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the strength of the greenback versus a basket of six other major currencies fell more than 0.25% to an intraday low of 94.38, returning near eight-month lows from early last week. The index briefly moved above 95 toward the tail end of last week before settling at 94.69 on Friday. Dollar-denominated commodities such as crude become more expensive for foreign purchasers when the dollar appreciates.