Bolstered by an arctic front swooping through the eastern half of the United States, natural gas futures found some support on Friday as the January contract reached a high of $4.676 before closing the regular session at $4.586, up 12.7 cents from Thursday’s close.

Friday halted the streak of consecutive price-slide days at four. Over the last five regular sessions the prompt-month contract has declined by 60.6 cents. Despite Friday’s rally, some market watchers are not so sure the bulls will be able to provide any follow-through on Monday.

“I think the shot of cold certainly gave this market a little bit of a backbone, but I’m not sure how long it is going to be good for,” said a Washington, DC-based broker. “I also think the positive employment news Friday also helped with the rally. However, we came off the day’s high pretty quickly, so it is not as strong of a move as it was at first glance.”

Despite the fits and starts within the market over the last few months, the broker said gas futures are basically range-bound. “I think we could continue to claw a little bit higher, but it depends on if the cold sticks around,” the broker said. “We’re still sitting on too much gas without enough demand. I see us as still being caught in a trading range with the high around $5.250 and low around $4.250. We’ve been bouncing back and forth between those points since the beginning of October, so I think it would take an awful lot of change to move us out of that range in one direction or another.”

Bulls were happy to see snow in Houston Friday as the first true arctic air mass of the season began to rock the eastern half of the country. “After dumping snow and creating slippery conditions in Texas and parts of the Deep South into Friday night, the season’s first widespread snowstorm on Saturday will take aim on major cities in the Northeast including Virginia and the Interstate 95 corridor,” according to Alex Sosnowski, a meteorologist with AccuWeather.com.

One broker noted that if the weather does not stay cold, prices would likely continue to move lower with the occasional blip to the upside mixed in. “The market dropped pretty significantly for the week, so the question is who wants to sell it much further down here with winter still ahead of us,” said Gene McGillian, a broker at Tradition Energy. “While we’ll likely see lower prices here in the next few weeks, it is certainly going to be a grind. You have to be careful because this market is pretty vulnerable to the short-covering spikes that we’ve seen over the last three to four months where we see a 30- to 40-cent pop in 10 minutes. The market is looking fundamentally as bearish as we’ve seen since we got through the majority of hurricane season without so much as a scratch.”

Economy watchers were pleased with the 8:30 a.m. EST release of employment data by the Labor Department. Expectations were for a loss of 100,000 non-farm jobs, an improvement over October’s 190,000 lost jobs. The actual figure came in at a loss of only 11,000 jobs. December Standard and Poor’s stock index futures rose 11.9 points after the release of the figures.

Analysts suggest that the report could easily have a positive impact on natural gas prices. “We are viewing the updated weather views as the primary driver of price and we will look for this pattern to continue going forward. Nonetheless, [Friday’s] employment data could still have a meaningful price impact since natural gas could easily get swept up in the post-report hoopla should the rest of the commodity space and the equities respond vigorously to the data in either direction,” said Jim Ritterbusch of Ritterbusch and Associates prior to the release of the employment data.

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