•Global crude futures were weaker Friday, taking some of the heat out of Thursday's late spike, as market participants sought trend indications from equity markets and from gasoline demand in crude markets, sources said. Comments from the OPEC meeting in Vienna, which began Friday, passed unnoticed by market participants.

•"There's an OPEC meeting but no one really cares about that right now," said a London-based trader. "It's the [US] non-farm payrolls that people are waiting for," the trader added. The payroll data will be released later Friday. "There appears to be a very close correlation in the directional move in equity markets and oil." Non-farm payrolls are a monthly report released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and aims to represent the total number of paid US workers in any business. This is viewed as a key indicator of US economic performance and hence of potential future demand for oil from the world's largest consumer of oil and refined products.

•In a daily oil report, analysts Petromatrix also touched on the employment data, saying: "WTI continues to trade according to the Dow, and today should not be very different with the release of the highly awaited US January employment numbers."

Updated: February 1, 2008