Natural gas futures appeared to be in a holding pattern early Thursday as analysts tried to gauge the durability of recent cold trends in the weather data. The December Nymex contract was off 0.7 cents to $3.024/MMBtu at around 8:40 a.m. ET.

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Based on colder trends in model runs over the past 24 hours, Bespoke Weather Services said early Thursday it had added 7.5 gas-weighted degree days (GWDD) to its projections.

“Most of the changes continue to come in next week, and we have added an impressive total of 20 GWDD since Monday morning’s forecast thanks to what we believe is a brief spike in upper level ridging around Alaska injecting more cold into the pattern for a few days,” Bespoke said. 

The European dataset on Wednesday afternoon hinted that “the changes could be a...