Cuts in oil supply renew bets on price rally

New York

INVESTORS have some sad reasons to be optimistic about oil prices.

Outbreaks of violence in Nigeria, export troubles in a divided Libya and wildfires ripping across the Canadian oil sands are reviving wagers that crude markets will tighten. Speculators' net-long position in benchmark US crude, a measure of how bets on a price increase outnumber bearish ones, climbed by the most contracts since March, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

"The …