•Global crude oil futures continued to fall towards $100/barrel in early European trade Tuesday, with the OPEC meeting in Vienna taking center stage and hurricane concerns in the US easing, sources said.

•Saudi Arabian oil minister Ali Naimi told reporters as he arrived in Vienna on Tuesday for OPEC's meeting that oil markets were "fairly well balanced" and that the kingdom had worked "very hard" since June to bring oil prices down to their current levels.

•On a technical basis, a downtrend seems to be establishing itself. "There has been a downtrend since mid-July. There have been a couple of outages which have stabilized prices--first the BTC pipeline outage and then Hurricane Gustav. But these only stabilized prices, they did not reverse the trend. When these (outages) faded prices then resumed downwards," a London-based trader said.

Updated: September 9, 2008