A cooler look from forecasts over the weekend helped send natural gas futures prices into retreat in early trading Monday. The September Nymex contract was off 3.8 cents to $2.200/MMBtu at around 8:45 a.m. ET. 

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Since Friday, the major weather models have trended cooler, with both the American and European datasets dropping several gas-weighted degree days from their projections for next week, Bespoke Weather Services said early Monday.

Models shifted “the focus of heat more into the West, allowing for variability in the eastern half of the nation,” Bespoke said. “Our official forecast was positioned cooler than the models given the bias for models to run too hot even in a hotter-than-normal pattern, so our numbers are not vastly different from Friday. 

“We still see a...