After finding some support at $5.96 in morning trading, the July natural gas futures contract worked itself back up to close at $6.082, down 3.3 cents on the day. Despite recording its sixth consecutive down day, the prompt month’s rebound off of the sub-$6 mark gave bears reason to pause, as bulls look to Thursday for confirmation of the support. Volume was heavy Wednesday with 106,852 contracts changing hands.

“If you look at the chart patterns through a candlestick view, you get a very different image of the day,” a Washington, DC-based broker said. He added that Wednesday’s trade resembled a “hammer formation,” a pattern where there is a significant extension down during the day, but the open and close are fairly close to one another near the top of the day’s range. In addition to resembling a hammer on the charts, the formation also indicates that the market is “hammering out a bottom,” the broker noted.

“We went all of the way down and still came back up,” he said. “We need to see follow-through tomorrow to the upside still, but if it holds, it would be an impressive bottom formation to begin here. Clearly, tomorrow will be the important day to look and see, because one day doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I could see this being the bottom of the test back down of the upward sloping channel we have been in ever since the beginning of the year.”

If futures are indeed finding support, then warmer temperatures over much of the country have arrived just in time to fuel a rebound. Even though the calendar start to summer is still two weeks away, Mother Nature got started five weeks ago, according to New York City-based Weather 2000.

Weather 2000 has warned that a majority of the country is in for a hot summer. May 2004 displayed widespread anomalous warmth from the Pacific to the Atlantic, the group noted. Despite its predictions for a warm summer, Weather 2000 said that even the hottest months and seasons on record had cool days and cool weeks thrown in. “That’s not pattern changes; that’s just the way our climate works,” the company said. “If you’re looking for a hot summer forecast to be verified where every day is hot, then your best bet is probably the Planet Venus.”

Weather 2000 pointed out that Los Angeles has gone 47 consecutive days without a “below normal day,” and Denver set a daily record high of 98°F on Tuesday. “Several states will record max temperatures into the 90’s this week, including the New York metro region, but be prepared for typical spring dips in the days that follow.”

The storage injection in this week’s EIA storage report for the week ended June 4 most likely will fall short of last year’s 125 Bcf build. The industry consensus is calling for an injection between 95-105 Bcf, which would be similar to the five-year average of 96 Bcf. The EIA releases its report every Thursday at 10:30 a.m. EDT.

Thursday also will be the last day this week for gas futures trading as the New York Mercantile Exchange Inc. will be closed Friday in observance of the national day of mourning for former President Ronald Reagan.

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