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News of oil workers' strike in Nigeria, drop in U.S. oil rigs, Forties outage support prices.

After several weeks of increases, Friday's weekly oil rig count from Baker Hughes showed a drop in the number of active oil rigs in the U.S. of 4 to currently 747. A year ago the number of active oil rigs was 510. However, U.S. crude oil production increased by 73,000 barrels last week.

Today, one of Nigeria's largest oil unions initiated a nationwide strike. Nigeria is the largest oil exporter in Africa and has been highly fragile in recent years. The strike is based on discontent over layoffs in the industry and it remains uncertain how long the strike might last.

Timing of restarting activities in the large Forties pipeline is still not determined and the outage is likely to affect oil prices.

Turning to economic data, the financial markets are digesting the U.S. tax reform consequences for the economy. Today, the Japanese trade data is published along with European CPIs. Tomorrow, U.S. housing data along with German business climate.