KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 7: Malaysian crude palm oil futures closed largely unchanged on Wednesday in slow trade as players waited for clearer direction from data due next week.

The benchmark third-month April contract on the Bursa Malaysia Derivatives exchange finished up 4 ringgit at 1,921 ringgit ($550) a ton.

There is not much movement today, we are waiting for some news from data next week to move the market, one dealer said.

Other traded contracts closed marginally up by between 2 and 8 ringgit. Overall volumes fell to 8,398 lots of 25 tons each compared with around 12,000 lots traded on a routine day.

The third-month contract jumped 2.3 per cent last week on a firm soyaoil market. But benchmark palm oil is still off eight-year highs of 2,062 ringgit reached in December, when floods disrupted deliveries.

The state-run Malaysian Palm Oil Board will release palm oil output, export and closing stocks data for January on Monday, when surveyors Intertek Testing Services and Societe Generale de Surveillance will release their export numbers for Feb. 1-10.

Malaysian palm oil bucked the usual trend of following the US soyaoil market, which closed lower on Tuesday.

March soyaoil on the Chicago Board of Trade settled 0.25 cents lower at 30.37 cents per lb, with the back months down 0.25 to 0.32.

Palm oil often tracks soyaoil because both commodities find uses in products from food and cosmetics to biodiesel.

In the physical crude palm oil market, February shipment in the southern region was quoted at 1,925/1,930 ringgit a ton.

Trades were done at 1,930 ringgit. Exports of Malaysian palm oil products in January fell 20 Per cent to 952,753 tons from 1,198,976 tons shipped in December, Intertek Services said.Societe Generale said exports during the same period fell 19.1 per cent to 957,228 tons.—Reuters