Olivier Jakob at Petromatrix introduced a new term on Monday: the dowlar.

It’s a reference to the correlation between oil prices and – you guessed it – the Dow and the dollar. It’s a cute term to sum up two of the key non-fundamental factors that are affecting oil prices, in the absence of much data showing a genuine improvement in demand.

Looking at Monday’s markets, for example, Petromatrix noted that the release of ISM manufacturing data triggered a bounce in the Dow, and then in crude oil futures. But none of this, Jakob wrote, gave much hope on oil market fundamentals:

However, in the real world of oil nothing has really changed apart maybe from ICE Gasoil moving into a deeper contango. Yes, the ISM manufacturing index is better than expected, GDP is growing and yes some factories that had been idled have been turned back on; but rail freight in the US is still down -14.8% from a year ago and down -17.3% from 2007 (week ending Oct24). The problem remains that the Distillates being produced around the world is going into the tanks of floating vessels rather than the tanks of 18 wheelers.

US crude oil prices slipped below the $80 a barrel level, surrendering gains made in Wednesday session following the latest US inventories data.

Nymex December West Texas Intermediate lost 58 cents at $79.82 a barrel, while ICE December Brent slipped 64 cents to $78.25 a barrel.

US crude stocks fell 4m barrels last week, confounding the consensus market forecast for an increase of 1.4m barrels.