Prices continued to drift lower again Thursday, but the declines were getting smaller and traders reported detecting hints of a strong possibility for a rebound today. Most of yesterday’s drops were around a dime or less, and scattered points such as intra-Alberta, Sumas, Texas Eastern-East Texas, the Florida and Algonquin citygates, Kern River and the California border-PG&E were flat to a tad higher.

Numbers were weak at the start but then rallied throughout the morning, according to a marketer trading the Northeast. “Prices went out near the high ends of their ranges, and that’s about where I expect them to start Friday,” he said, adding that the screen’s uptick of a little more than 7 cents should give cash an extra boost. He reported that Transco Zone 6-NYC was already trading at $2.30 for the weekend after averaging in the low to mid $2.10s Thursday morning.

Eastern markets are finally getting ready to experience weather more like that of a normal December after seeing a lot of date-specific high temperature records being set earlier this week across the Midwest, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, the Weather Channel said. Traders cited the approaching turn of weather as the chief reason to expect a spot market rally today.

A Midcontinent source concurred that prices had “popped up pretty good there at the end,” saying he had made late deals as high as $1.92 for ANR-Southwest and $1.90 for Waha. However, he found it “hard to understand why people would pay up to 30 cents or so above where prices started.” He acknowledged that a change in the weather was due, but to him it didn’t seem severe enough to turn a previously weak market around, especially with most storage facilities still close to full more than a month after the start of withdrawal season.

Cold weather has already arrived in much of the West, said a trader quoting a PG&E citygate average only 2 cents down from NGI’s index for Thursday flows. It won’t really be felt in the gas market until next summer, he said, but the recent burst of winter storms from the Pacific Northwest through the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains has left the western hydropower situation “much improved” following an extended drought period.

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