With fundamental influences remaining weak and a falling screen to boot, it was hardly surprising Monday when cash prices failed for the most part to rebound from their weekend softness. Movement ranged from essentially flat to down a dime or so at nearly all eastern, California and Permian Basin points. The weakness was more pronounced in the Rockies/Pacific Northwest and San Juan Basin markets, where declines ranged from about a dime to 20 cents.

What surprised some traders, however, was the ability of the cash market to hang in as toughly as it did. There’s almost no weather to speak of, tropical storm activity is a non-event, and room to inject more storage is dwindling rapidly, sources said. Thus they had difficulty in discerning why prices failed to drop much further Monday.

The most common rationale offered for only mild softening was a lack of liquidity at many points. Fewer traders are currently active, with some being drawn to an energy trade fair in Houston this week, a marketer said. That means that those who have been riding out short positions so far this month are finding their supplier choices more limited as they finally step up to a buying mode, he added.

Virtually all of the Gulf Coast points followed the screen tightly, a producer said. “We had good demand, more than I expected. It was not from weather or storage, so I assumed there were some traders getting caught short.”

Still, another source said, it’s a mystery that prices aren’t dropping like a rock at this point. “Everybody is finally accepting that AGA will be reporting a small injection, so it couldn’t be interpreted as bullish. There’s just not much space left to put more storage. They’re having to work the compressors overtime to stuff in the last little bit.”

The relative dearth of weather-related load puzzled a marketer who saw Chicago citygates run up from the mid $2.20s to more than $2.40 in late deals. The late prices were at a premium to the screen, a situation that was especially strong when you consider that the citygate was running a quarter or more below the November futures contract about a week ago, he said.

The weather factor was also pretty weak in the Northeast, a regional trader said, but “the LNG problem” is playing a role. It’s not cold enough to make a big difference for now, but federal officials still are not allowing LNG tankers into Boston Harbor because of fears of potential terrorism, he said. The trader estimated that about 300 MMcf/d of supply is are currently out of the Northeast market because Distrigas of Massachusetts has drained its LNG stocks. “They [Distrigas] issued a force majeure about one and a half weeks ago. They tried to keep their customers whole at first, but then realized that couldn’t be sustained. We’re on fragile grounds in the Northeast market if the LNG constraint continues into November.”

Traders were still buzzing about AGA’s plan to cease issuing storage reports at the start of next year, but some reported detecting a “who cares?” attitude beginning to develop. The reports will be missed, of course, but a couple of sources said they expect some entity, most likely the federal Energy Information Administration, to fill in the gap with more timely reports of its own. Even if that doesn’t happen, “traders will just go back to muddling through like they did in the late 1980s and early 1990s before the [AGA] storage report began,” a Midcontinent marketer said.

Meanwhile, another source said he wasn’t surprised at AGA’s quitting the reporting game, adding, “If you’re going to have a bad number [referring to the 47 BCF revision two months ago of a shockingly low 3 Bcf injection figure], you might as well not have a number at all.” An aggregator said he thought too much importance was put into the storage reports anyway. “More often than not the market just used AGA’s report as an ‘excuse’ to do something, whether it was related to storage or not. I think we’re just as well off to lose it [report].”

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