The cash market followed Wednesday’s leveling-off phase with upward movement at nearly all points Thursday. Quotes ranged from flat to up nearly 20 cents, with gains in the range of 5-15 cents being most common. A couple of scattered points saw small losses.

Moderate cooling trends in the Midwest and Northeast accounted for much of the fundamental basis of price strength. Temperatures are trending towards the freezing level in the Midwest, so many of Thursday’s double-digit advances were concentrated in the Midwest/Midcontinent market.

Screen signals were about as clear as mud to at least one cash trader. After mild strength prior to EIA’s report of 48 Bcf in storage withdrawals last week, futures spiked briefly to just over $4.00 but then dove back into negative territory and ended the day down nearly a penny. This occurred despite the current drawdown combining with the year-ago injection of 35 Bcf injection to represent a total year-to-year swing of 83 Bcf, the trader said.

However, a marketer reported hearing people talking late Wednesday about storage pulls as big as 65 Bcf, revising previous guesses upward. “Thus any potential bullishness in the actual report was already factored into the market,” he said.

A Midcontinent trader called the EIA report “a healthy number. We were done [with most cash business] when it came out, so we could sit back and watch the screen jump. We got back into the market a little later and sold it on the upswing. We were surprised at the way [the screen] came back down after running up.”

Industry analyst Kyle Cooper of Salomon Smith Barney offered this take on the storage figure: “It is considered quite bullish, even on a temperature-adjusted basis. However, the market did not respond as expected. From rumors heard, there was some thought that the regional draws were odd and therefore might lead to a revision. However, we do not believe that the large producing region draw was all that strange. Based on operational and economic considerations, it did seem more desirable to withdraw producing region storage and ship it to the Northeast rather than draw from local [Northeast] storage facilities.”

Northeast prices started out a little higher but had been coming down until the storage report came out and popped up prices, a producer said. “Cash was only affected for a short time and most traders were done, so there won’t be much of an effect on the WACOGs. Tomorrow morning [Friday] prices will be up, because there is cold weather coming in. Today’s storage report has yet to be felt by the swing market. But the normal weekend dropoff will take a bite out of prices, keeping them from going too high.”

A Calgary-based marketer offered another hint of further price firmness Friday, saying his next-day intra-Alberta deals in the high C$5.00s were about a nickel above same-day numbers.

Noting that Chicago citygates at one point were 13 cents over the screen, a Midwest marketer said he was “shocked” at cash prices being so strong. However, he was hearing reports of Northern Natural Gas “buying some big-time volumes” in the Midcontinent, although he was puzzled about why the pipeline might take such an unusual action.

“It’s either feast or famine in Florida,” said one of the state’s utility buyers who had no prices to report. “We couldn’t get gas back a couple of months ago” when tropical storms were cutting Gulf of Mexico production and the market-area weather was much hotter than Thursday’s mild conditions, he said. “But now that our loads are so low that we don’t need anything, we have suppliers begging us to take their gas.”

Another trader on the Florida Gas Transmission system said the pipeline’s pig run Thursday in East Texas seemed to be causing negligible impact, “but I stayed away from the affected area anyway in sourcing gas Wednesday.”

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