Straight

After four straight days of declines — a total drop of $1.26 — April futures may have begun to stage a reversal on Friday, moving up 14.9 cents to $6.993 on some short covering and additional buying interest. The daily high Friday was $7.110 and the low was $6.870. The increase was just enough to prolong the uncertainty and to keep the record highs of two weeks ago fresh in traders’ minds.

Natural gas futures surged to new 24-month highs for the third straight session Friday as traders bid up prices in a feeding frenzy after the trading floor of Nymex shook for nearly 10 seconds that morning when a barge carrying gasoline exploded in New York Harbor.

For the second day in a row, the natural gas futures market opened higher but fell lower late in the session as traders elected to take profits on the hunch that all the bullish news available has already been factored into prices. By virtue of losses Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, the November contract becomes the first prompt month since September to notch a string of three down days. It closed at $4.11, down 4.7 cents for the session and a whopping 31 cents beneath Monday’s 18-month high at $4.42.

After checking higher to notch a new, 16-month high for the second straight session, natural gas futures shuffled lower in two distinct surges of commercial selling Tuesday afternoon. At $4.247, the November contract closed nearly a dime off its $4.34 high and 5.6 cents lower for the session.

After experiencing three-straight weeks of lower-than-anticipated storage injections, the bears finally got a break Thursday when the Energy Information Administration (EIA) surprised traders with the news that 59 Bcf had been injected into underground storage facilities for the week ending Aug. 23. Natural gas futures took the news squarely on the chin in early trading as the October contract dropped as much as 22.8 cents in morning action to notch a daily low at $3.175. However, bargain buyers stepped in to lift the new prompt month to a close of $3.25, representing a 15.3 cent drop on the day.

Despite a second straight day record electricity demand, and spiking New York City physical gas prices, natural gas futures traded quietly sideways Tuesday, as neither bull nor bear was willing to influence a move in either direction. On its first day as prompt contract, September slipped 1.4 cents to finish at $2.891, just 0.1 cents above its opening trade for the session and smack-dab in the middle of its $2.85-93 trading range. At 86,242, estimated volume was moderate to light.

For a third straight month, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., San Francisco, reported Thursday that natural gas prices have settled into their “historical averages,” as the utility’s retail natural gas prices through the end of March this year are about 60% below last year’s record levels. In March, the PG&E utility announced that the average residential bill for natural gas will be $39.23, a 59% drop from March 2001 when the average residential bill was $95.06.

For a third straight trading day Monday, mild firmness was the dominant cash market trait. A few scattered points fell by a couple of pennies, but the rest saw prices ranging from flat to nearly a dime higher in most cases. Overall increases remained small, however, as a majority of upticks were less than a nickel.

Florida Gas Transmission ended an Overage Alert Day notice for its market area Saturday after the notice had been in effect 10 straight days.