Strong cash price advances continued Tuesday, but there were signs that this week’s bull market may have just about run its course. The futures screen stayed positive for a while in the morning, but then later settled for a 12.6-cent loss that took it back to exactly where it had ended regular trading Friday. And unlike the previous couple of trading days where late quotes had moved sharply higher, cash prices were coming back off again near deadline Tuesday.

Yesterday’s gains were both smaller than those seen Monday and more consistent across geographical markets. A great majority of points rose 20-25 cents amid gains that ranged between about 15 cents to more than 30 cents at all points.

People seemed to be rethinking the forecasts for colder weather approaching the Midwest and Northeast, and deciding that temperatures would not be cold enough to support further price hikes, which accounted for the late retreats Tuesday, according to a marketer. Another trader conceded that the worst of the cold is still coming up for the major northern market areas, but said much of the cold will be occurring over the weekend, when falling industrial demand will tend to cancel its effect. Then a warming trend is due about the time the weekend ends, he said.

Opinions were mixed on the direction for cash today. At least one producer looks for prices to take a cue from the Tuesday screen and head back down. But another producer looks for cash to be at least flat to slightly firmer today, based on winter storms moving eastward from the Upper Plains. However, “most of the near-term weather has already been factored into the market,” he said. Another marketer was somewhat ambivalent, saying, “I don’t want to predict prices going down Wednesday, because then they’ll almost surely go up again.”

A Calgary-based producer said intraday intra-Alberta prices hit C$4.00 for the first time in quite a while Tuesday. “They opened at C$3.95, and now [mid-afternoon] it’s sitting at C$3.80, so it’s jumping around.” He went on to say there seems to be a fair amount of uncertainty about the province’s storage situation. “We are putting almost nothing into the ground” recently, he said. Some people think there could be 70 Bcf of supposed storage gas that has yet to be accounted for, the producer added.

A marketer reported a snowfall Tuesday morning in Calgary, “but none of it was sticking.” You only had to go a little further north toward Edmonton, however, to “run into a real blizzard,” another source said.

Little besides index-based trading are being done so far for November, a marketer said. Midcontinent field deals are following the tendency of recent bidweeks in being discounted from index, he added, quoting discounts of about 2 cents or so. Chicago citygates are being discounted only mildly at about half a cent under index, he said.

However, a Northeast trader said citygates in that region were not seeing discounts from index, but were rather flat or possibly at a small premium. He reported seeing Texas Eastern M-3 being traded for the November-March period at index plus 8-9 cents.

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