U.S. oil prices steady ahead of election, but oversupply still weighs

By Henning Gloystein

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oil prices were stable early on Tuesday after posting strong gains the previous day, with investors piling money into financial markets in expectation that Democrat Hillary Clinton would win the U.S. presidential election.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were down 1 cent at $44.88 per barrel at 0038 GMT. The contract had gained almost 1.9 percent the previous session on polls putting Clinton ahead of her Republican competitor Donald Trump for Tuesday's election.

"Oil appears to have coat-tailed most other commodities higher, as part of a Clinton-led, broad based, risk asset rally," said Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at brokerage OANDA in Singapore.

 

"Crude oil prices bounced off key support levels as investors piled back into the energy sector," ANZ bank said on Tuesday.

In physical oil markets, U.S. pipeline companies with operations at the heart of the country's commercial oil industry at Cushing, Oklahoma, restarted on Monday after a 5.0-magnitude earthquake late on Sunday triggered safety shutdowns.

However, traders said that financial crude markets were capped by lingering doubts over the ability of oil producers to agree on a planned output cut in order to prop up a market which has been dogged by two years of oversupply.

The chief executive of U.S. oil giant Exxon Mobil , Rex Tillerson said on Monday that global oil supplies have exceeded demand by 1 to 1 million barrels per day since the start of 2015.

(Reporting by Henning Gloystein; Editing by Joseph Radford)