Traders saw a down-then-up pattern in many markets Monday asprice ranges tended to remain volatile, though not as large asduring Friday’s meltdown. The ups were smaller than the downs inmost cases, leaving average prices ranging from barely softer to asmuch as a dime lower. Malin saw the greatness weakness with a fallof about 15 cents, even though weekend OFOs at the Northern andSouthern California borders had ended.

“We came off and made our lows around 9:15 [CST], not long aftertrading started,” a Gulf Coast source said. Then pipes were tradingat their highs near the end of activity.The source thinks somemarketers speculatively sold down early on, expecting to buy thesupplies even more cheaply later, but that strategy boomeranged onthem. There was “fairly good electric demand in Louisiana” for bothintraday and Tuesday flows, he said, because several nuclear plantsin the regional grid and “humidity is growing.”

A Texas producer wished someone had called him before 9:45 andwarned him to hold off on selling for a while.

Chicago citygates joined the overall market crowd in softeningearly, a marketer said, but spiked late because a big buyer cameout late. Several players in the Chicago market had anticipated thelate purchases, she said.

Today’s outage of El Paso’s Bondad Station (see Daily GPI, May4) should make for an interesting market in the Southwest, amarketer said. A producer, asked jokingly whether he was lookingforward to the outage, replied, “Yeah. I look forward to it beingover!”

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