Cash numbers that had been firming for nearly all of last week finally headed back down Friday despite the prospect of cool to freezing weekends almost everywhere. Instead, traders looked ahead to general warming trends early this week, some of them due to start before Monday, and behind to Thursday’s screen drop of nearly a quarter in sending prices lower.

Naturally, the typical weekend slump in industrial load also played a part in declines ranging from about a dime to about 35 cents; those of 15-30 cents were most common. Other than the smallest dips being concentrated at Rockies/Pacific Northwest points, the softness was pretty consistent across geographic lines.

A Calgary-based producer said that although upcoming fundamentals look weak (the National Weather Service predicted that the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. will have returned to above normal temperatures by the middle of this week), he wasn’t sure if the market faces a solid week of falling quotes. “The funds are really, really short at Nymex,” he observed, so cash could get a screen lift.

Also, the forecasts beyond midweek tend to diverge, so a bit of weather support could return, the producer said. As for Calgary itself, temperatures hit minus 20 degrees C. (about minus 4 F.) Thursday, but things were “a little warmer” Friday with the high soaring to around minus 10 C. (about plus 14 F.), he added.

A utility buyer in the Midwest said he also had significant problems Thursday at the demarcation point of Northern Natural Gas similar to those reported by another source (see Daily GPI, Nov. 7), losing 15-20 MMcf/d of supply. The experience was somewhat akin to the pipeline requiring you to produce a notarized affidavit of having firm service, he said. However, the problems disappeared Friday as NNG said it had halted demarc allocations (see Transportation Notes), the buyer said. Demarc quotes slipped about a quarter into the mid $4.60s.

Northeast temperatures could dramatically rebound starting Tuesday following Sunday lows in the 30s and 40s, according to The Weather Channel, but that would be “ahead of the next cold front.” It had a similar outlook for the Midwest, saying freezing weather in the Ohio Valley and possible record lows around zero in the Upper Plains would yield to a surge of warm air from the South Monday through Wednesday, but again there was the cautionary “ahead of the next cold front.”

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