After etching out a wide, half-dollar trading range last week,natural gas futures settled down appreciably Tuesday, as tradersremained largely on the sidelines ahead of the release of freshweather and storage news. Low estimated volume of just 46,818 was atestament to the quiet session.

With that the November contract slipped 0.4-cents to close at$5.348 after being held to an extremely tight 9-cent trading range.A similar dearth of volatility was seen in the out months — noneof which were able to move more than a penny from Monday’s close.

Sources were quick to point to last Thursday’s 32.3-cent priceslide as the reason bull traders are a little hesitant to retry thelong side of the market. Conversely, sellers are slow to initiatefresh shorts in a market that has burned them repeatedly over thepast nine months and is still solidly in a bull trend. To makematters worse, there exists the real potential for price fireworksWednesday when more is known about the expected course andintensity of Tropical Depression Keith, sources said.

As it stands now, odds are that the storm will re-intensify intoa hurricane but will miss most of the natural gas production assetsin the Gulf of Mexico. Nevertheless, traders will likely continueto eschew liquidating hurricane-hype related longs until the threathas diminished more completely.

Another lighting rod on trader’s house of cards today is theAmerican Gas Association’s weekly release of fresh storage data at2:00 P.M. (EDT). Expectations ahead of that report are centered ona net injection of 60-70 Bcf, which if realized, would fall in linewith both last year’s 62 Bcf refill and the 5-year average build of66 Bcf. Comparatively, last week’s injection, which shocked themarket and sent prices spiraling lower Thursday, was 79 Bcf.

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