By 
Oil futures were on track Thursday to notch their fourth session gain in a row, a day after the Federal Reserve delivered another quarter-point interest-rate hike and signaled one more increase this year.
Price action
West Texas Intermediate crude for May delivery
CL00,
-0.25%
CL.1,
-0.25%
CLK23,
-0.25%
rose 26 cents, or 0.4%, to $71.16 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices for t he front-month contract gained 1.8% Wednesday to end that session at the highest since March 14.
May Brent crude
BRN00,
-0.13%
BRNK23,
-0.13%
was up 24 cents, or 0.3%, at $76.93 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe.
Back on Nymex, April gasoline
RBJ23,
+1.26%
climbed by 1.4% to $2.6293 a gallon, while April heating oil
HOJ23,
-0.69%
lost 0.7% to $2.7218 a gallon.
April natural gas
NGJ23,
+0.37%
rose 0.9% to $2.189 per million British thermal units.
Market drivers
Crude prices ended higher Wednesday after the Federal Reserve delivered a quarter-point rate hike, as expected. The Fed’s forecast showed policy makers expect just one more rate increase this year.
“The oil market became oversold last week and futures fell into key support that was also a key downside technical target near $66 [a] barrel,” analysts at Sevens Report Research wrote in Thursday’s newsletter. “That opened the door to a rebound this week.”
Wednesday’s “bullish-leaning” data from the Energy Information Administration and “dovishly interpreted Fed served as a dual-pronged catalyst for the bounce in futures to continue,” they said. The EIA on Wednesday reported a 1.1 million-barrel rise in last week’s U.S. crude inventories, along with a 6.4 million-barrel drop in gasoline stockpiles.
Crude has bounced back since tumbling last week to a 15-month low on fears that trouble in the banking sector could lead to a significant economic downturn. WTI and Brent futures settled Wednesday at their highest since March 14.
“While no one can say with confidence that a banking crisis has been averted, there is growing confidence that the actions taken by central banks, regulators, and governments have significantly reduced the odds of one, particularly a severe scenario, and that is ultimately good for the economy and crude demand,” said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at OANDA, in a note.
U.S. government data Thursday showed at the number of Americans who applied for unemployment benefits last week slipped to a three-week low of 191,000, showing that the labor market remains strong. Even so, the number of raw or actual claims — before seasonal adjustments — was much higher last week compared to the same week a year earlier.
Near term, the oversold bounce in oil prices “can continue into the mid- or even upper-$70s,” the Sevens Report analysts said. “In spite of the dovish Fed, risks remain skewed to the downside for oil and the refined products as a 2023 recession remains very likely.”
Natural-gas futures, meanwhile, held onto a gain for the session after the EIA on Thursday said domestic natural-gas supplies fell by 72 billion cubic feet for the week ended March 17. That nearly matched the average analyst forecast for a decline of 71 billion cubic feet, based on a survey conducted by S&P Global Commodity Insights.
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