After beginning Friday’s session on a sideways-to-slightly-lower path, April natural gas futures started to tilt upwards ever so slightly beginning at 11 a.m. EST. After peaking at $7.31 in afternoon trading, the prompt month went on to settle at $7.273, up 3.5 cents on the session and a whopping 50.1 cents over the previous Friday’s close.

Despite the shakiness observed in natural gas futures on Thursday, the prompt month on Friday was still able to hold onto its gains for the week, thanks in part to April crude returning to strength again Friday by settling 32 cents higher at $56.72/bbl.

“It was a very lackluster day and liquids have been pretty quiet,” said a Washington, DC-based broker. “Natural gas futures didn’t have a whole lot of zest Friday, so it might have been a good time to be an option buyer because there wasn’t a whole lot of volatility.” The broker said it is possible that the $7.25 mark “is the new $6.85,” which was the price the market seemed to gravitate to earlier in the month.

Looking ahead, the broker said he believes futures have some more work to do to complete this upward spring phase. “While the current high-water mark is pegged at $7.38, I believe there is still some more push to the upside left before this thing is through.”

However, according to a New York floor trader, the market is exhibiting signs of weakness. “Traders don’t want to own the front of the board. If you look at the spreads, the relationships between the front months and the back months, that is widening,” he said. He noted that the May-January spread is a good example. It settled at $1.055 (January over May) on Wednesday and the market traded higher. The spread continues to widen. On Thursday it settled at over $1.09. “I bought May-January spreads for a customer at $0.95 earlier and that spread has widened over 10 cents as the market rallied. That’s not a good sign. If a market is going to rally, it will reflect it in the front months rather than the backs,” he added. On Friday, the spread was $1.094.

IFR Energy Services’ Tim Evans said, “A quiet session [Friday] has left April futures near unchanged and safely within its recent $7.06-7.38 trading range.” He added that it appears the market is capable of holding its recently achieved higher range due to support from above average storage withdrawals and a bit of ongoing cold.

While there appears there is still a little bit of cold in store for the East this week, spring weather for the entire country shouldn’t be too far off, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). In the latest NWS six-to-10-day outlook, the entire eastern third of the country — except Florida — is still expected to be experiencing colder than normal temperatures. During this time frame, the West is expected to see above normal temperatures and the remaining areas of the country will feel normal temperature-wise for this time of year.

Keeping an eye on weather forecasts for the summer, Evans said it is still soon to tell what the country will see. “Some long-term forecasts suggest hotter-than-normal temperatures across the South this summer, but we are really talking about something like a 60% chance of temperatures averaging warmer than normal,” Evans said. “That’s not quite the same as a guarantee of 105 degrees in Dallas from May 15 on. The market may have an opportunity to hype the heat, since it is hard to argue against ‘I hear it’s going to be a hot summer’ when there is no data either way.”

In addition to the release of real summer temperature outlooks, Evans said the first hurricane season forecasts expected in early April are also highly anticipated. “It’s not hard to figure, though, that while the Atlantic hurricane season could be busy, the production losses associated with it are likely to be much less than a year ago,” he said.

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