The Brent oil price firmed a little overnight on not much news flow with US markets closed ending at $65.88. There is more evidence today that much of what we are seeing in oil price strength is technical, from Oilprice.com:
Figure 1 below shows the relationship between U.S. crude oil storage inventory and WTI price. The thinking around recent withdrawals from storage is that this reflects depleting supply. The data, however, reflects that traders were storing crude oil during the price collapse in order to realize higher prices later. With rising prices over the last month, traders are selling their stored volumes. The recent inventory build correlates almost perfectly with the fall in oil prices and the withdrawals from storage over that last 3 weeks correlate with the 35% increase in oil prices since late March.
Previous builds and withdrawals from inventory also correlate with price but generally price followed changes in inventory. In the recent case, price led inventory changes.