Late

Buoyed by a late short-covering rally natural gas futuresstruggled back up to just below unchanged yesterday as traderschose to wait on the sidelines ahead of the release of freshstorage data. The closing up-tick was the only feature bulls couldstomach in a market preoccupied by continued mild weather acrossmuch of the country. The February contract finished down 0.8 centsat $2.168 following a session that saw prices match Tuesday’s $2.20high but plumb a half-cent below Tuesday’s $2.13 low.

Feeding off last Thursday’s late sell-off, natural gas futurestumbled lower yesterday as traders liquidated January positionsahead of the contract’s expiration Tuesday. After gapping lower atthe open, January dropped below key support levels at $2.38-39 and$2.32-34 en route to its $2.271 settlement. Including yesterday’s12.8-cent decline, the January contract has plummeted 45 cents fromMonday’s $2.715 high of a week ago.

Fueled by a late sell-off, natural gas futures continued lowerlast Wednesday and put the finishing touches on a December futurescontract which slipped a whopping $1.06 or one-third of its valuesince becoming the spot contract a month ago. With no fresh news todigest, the market defaulted to the same old negative price outlookformed around above-normal temperatures and plentiful gas supplies.After hitting a black hole of buying below $2.21 shortly after noonWednesday, the December contract free-fell 6.9-cents to expire at$2.12 in abbreviated pre-holiday trading.

Late-November swing prices got “crushed” Monday, burdened bothtechnically by a slumping futures screen and fundamentally by acontinuing surplus of unseasonably warm weather, a Texas-basedproducer lamented. Virtually all points dropped between a nickeland about 15 cents, with declines in the vicinity of a dime beingmost common.

Utility companies were close to conceding defeat late last week in their effort to get an amendment attached to a congressional spending bill that would absolve them of prosecution under the clean-air lawsuits bought by the Justice Department on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) earlier this month (See NGI, Nov. 8).

For the third time in as many days the futures market gavetraders a head fake on the open, only to retrace during theremainder of the session. However, while the price action Mondayand Tuesday was down, then up, the opposite was true yesterday.Feeding off gains achieved during Tuesday’s Access trading session,the December contract notched its $2.905 high moments after theopen and proceeded to chop lower throughout the day. But thoselosses proved inadequate to overcome earlier gains and that enabledthe prompt contract to break its string of declines at 4 days,finishing instead up 3.6 cents at $2.873.

The electricity restructuring legislation that survived markupby the House Energy and Power Subcommittee late Wednesday is ashell of the bill that was sponsored by Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX),energy industry analysts say.

In a rumor that first broke late last week, Consolidated Edison(ConEd), a combination utility serving over three million electricand one million gas customers in New York, is reported to be inmerger talks with West Springfield, MA-based Northeast Utilities(NU), the largest electric utility in New England. Neither companywould comment on the subject. The reported stock and cash dealwould value NU at $2.8 billion.

Following a two day, 18-cent price slide, the natural gasfutures market held its ground yesterday as traders were reluctantto push very far from center ahead of the release of fresh storagedata. The October contract was held to a tight 7-cent tradingrange, finishing 0.1 cents lower at $2.426.