Although most points were softer Friday as expected, the market found enough traction from cooler weekend weather in key northern market areas to keep a majority of the losses fairly small, and a few flat to moderately higher prices found their way into the mix. Trading was for Sunday-Monday flows because of the weekend transition between months.

The May aftermarket got launched with declines ranging from a couple of pennies to more than 20 cents prevailing. The Permian Basin and Midcontinent saw most of the double-digit drops; otherwise, most of the softening was by less than a dime. Points in South and East Texas claimed the lion’s share of flat or higher numbers, with gains getting as large as a little more than a dime.

“I was really surprised at how easy it was to find market for the first two days of May,” said a Gulf Coast marketer who sells gas on behalf of several independent producers. She knew there would be some weekend cold weather in the North, but said it didn’t seem like enough to put a floor under prices. It was a very quiet market day, she added, with a lot of people out of their offices after having wrapped up bidweek business earlier in the week. She reported not being aware of any May baseload still being traded Friday.

It was not expected to be quite as severe as the preceding weekend, but cold fronts were forecast to be on the march again Saturday through Monday in the Midwest, Northeast and some of the South. Light snow was possible in parts of the North, according to The Weather Channel (TWC). Meanwhile, the Rockies, which had already turned cold earlier in the week, would remain around the freezing level through the weekend, TWC said.

It was already “a little chilly” Friday in the Northeast, which could expect a cold and wet weekend, a producer said. Noting Friday’s $2-plus plunge in crude oil futures to less than $50/bbl, he said cash gas was sucked in by the extreme crude weakness, with prices moving lower in later deals. However, even with Friday’s much weaker energy futures (the natural gas screen dropped 16.3 cents), he doesn’t believe that cash quotes will necessarily be softer Monday. “People may see a buying opportunity” in the recent softening of prices, the producer said, pointing out that the Nymex strip was still providing incentive to buy storage supplies now rather than later.

A marketer who trades the Chicago citygate perceived some heating load in the market area, saying lows Sunday and Monday around Chicago would not be far above freezing. However, the city should be seeing highs in the low 70s by next Friday, he said. He expected the Chicago index for May to come in just under $7.

A western trader noted that it got to be a “pretty wild ride” during bidweek when Wednesday’s screen dive “caused fixed prices to go all over the place.” Indexed deals got decidedly more negative after that, he said. He reported doing a late Southern California border deal as low as the NGI index minus 12 cents. He added that he heard the border discount to index may have gotten as big as 15 cents, but was not aware of any actual deals done there.

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