Oil stocks were mostly down a bit on the day despite the fact that oil traded slightly higher during the session. After this morning's inventory reports I would have expected to see prices trading higher, but traders had other ideas.

This morning we saw greater declines in both oil and gasoline inventories, but this was not enough to get the bulls to charge in and lift oil stocks. Crude oil inventories had been expected to climb by about a half million barrels but what we saw was a decline of 1 million barrels. Gasoline supplies had been expected to fall by 1.3 million barrels and they surprised traders by plummeting 2.7 million barrels.

With the much larger drops in inventory than had been expected we would typically expect to see a very strong day for oil prices. Today though, this was not the case and we saw oil prices rise, but only by $0.05 to $63.15.

So what was the main reason why today's inventories surprises were unable to give oil a price lift? Traders seemed to be looking ahead and expecting to see future gasoline inventories on the rise as the nations refineries showed a 2% rise in usage. Analysts had been expecting that refinery usage would increase by less than a half percent.