After losing 7 percent of it's value since Monday, crude prices stabilized by afternoon to end the week.

Light, sweet crude for January delivery rose 51 cents to settle at $49.93 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Earlier, in electronic trading, the price dipped to $48.25, the lowest level since May 18, 2005.

In London, January Brent crude rose $105 to $49.13 on the ICE Futures exchange.

Friday's activity reflected just how closely oil traders have gauged the mood in equities markets over the past several weeks.

Wall Street moved cautiously higher Friday, with investors taking a breather from the heavy selling of recent days. Energy and utility stocks showed some advances.

It was a different story earlier in the week.

The Dow plunged Thursday after the Labor Department said new applications for jobless benefits exceeded analyst estimates and rose to the highest level of claims since July 1992 and investors grew even more leery about the health of the nation's biggest banks.

Benchmark crude trailed Wall Street, falling as low as $48.50 a barrel.

In a note to clients Friday, Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. Securities said economic concerns are clearly trumping any further production cuts by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which accounts for about 40 percent of global supply.

OPEC lowered production quotas by 1.5 million barrels a day last month, and some analysts predict even lower levels to come out of the cartel's next official meeting Dec. 17.

Such action "may not matter until folks have more visibility/comfort on (the) demand side," the Tudor Pickering note said.

Oil prices have been crushed as the global economic downturn has diminished demand.

How low prices can go is anyone's guess.

"Do not trust anyone in this market who tries to convince you that oil cannot go below $40," Schork said in his report Friday. "The same way no one had a clue how high prices could go last July, there is no telling how low we can go now."

In other Nymex trading, gasoline futures rose 5.7 cents to settle at $1.0643 a gallon. Heating oil gained 2.37 cents to settle at $1.6996 a gallon while natural gas for December delivery advanced 21.6 cents to $6.532 per 1,000 cubic feet.

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Associated Press writers George Jahn in Vienna, Austria, Alex Kennedy in Singapore and Pablo Gorondi in Budapest, Hungary contributed to this report.