Prices emerged from the weekend to resume the slide that dominated much of last week’s market. Only the California border-SoCalGas managed to show a gain for the day as a terribly weak screen, continued lack of fundamental support and expectations of another big storage injection report this week combined to push nearly all points down between 10 and 20 cents Monday.

For a Gulf Coast producer, it was a “same old same old” market, meaning that the same factors that have depressed prices almost continually in the May aftermarket have shown little change this week. It’s a tough call on how much further the market will keep falling, he said. “As May began people were talking about waiting until the middle of the month for air conditioning load to kick in and ‘generate’ a turnaround. Now the [rebound] talk seems to be edging more towards late May.”

A Northeast trader tended to agree. “It’s hard to find a bullish fundamental anywhere,” he said. “We’re looking for pretty mild weather in the Northeast over the next two weeks; it’s unlikely to get either very hot or very cold.”

Malin saw one of Monday’s smallest declines of about a nickel, but still slipped below $5.00 to about half of its $9.94 first-of-month index. Station 4C maintenance on PG&E Gas Transmission-Northwest is trimming about 60 MMcf/d off Kingsgate capacity, a marketer said. Warm temperatures in California prompted Cal-ISO to go to a Stage Two Electrical Emergency Monday as a large amount of generation, including four offline nuclear units in the West, remained unavailable for various reasons. However, a PG&E customer-specific OFO that was expanded to a systemwide one Sunday and Monday dampened citygate and border-PG&E quotes even though the OFO was lifted for today.

A Calgary trader reporting Westcoast Station 2 numbers in the low C$6.00s compared to intra-Alberta prices about 20 cents lower said the two points usually trade near parity, but he thinks they have spread apart due to excess supplies on the NOVA system.

Liquidity may get noticeably tighter at various points after today through the end of the week as some in the trading community do multi-day deals before heading to Tampa, FL, for this year’s GasMart/Power trade fair, a marketer observed.

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