(MENAFN- The Peninsula) DUBAI: Middle East stock markets may have a soft tone on Monday because of weak oil prices and technical barriers.
Brent crude oil has dropped to just above $47 a barrel in early Asian trade on fears that producer countries meeting this week could fail to agree on a meaningful output cut.
Saudi Arabia's energy minister Khalid al-Falih said on Sunday night that he believed the oil market would balance itself in 2017 even if producers did not intervene, and that keeping output at current levels could therefore be justified.
Although MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan is up 0.6 percent, led by gains in Hong Kong and Taiwan, U.S. stock futures are down 0.2 percent.
The Saudi stock index rose 0.7 percent on Sunday to 6,844 points but it stopped short of technical resistance on its April peak of 6,876 points, which it had tested and failed to break on Thursday. Trading volume fell sharply, a negative technical sign.
The Egyptian index dropped 1.8 percent to 11,146 points on Sunday, confirming a bearish engulfing pattern on the daily candlestick chart - a classic technical sign of the reversal of an uptrend, after the market soared this month in response to the float of the Egyptian pound.
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