Traded

Natural gas futures activity on Tuesday was muted as the November contract traded within a slim 20-cent range between $6.837 and $6.643 before closing the regular session at $6.727, up 3.9 cents from Monday’s finish.

Hurricane Gustav shut-ins in the Gulf of Mexico turned into Hurricane Ike shut-ins on Monday and natural gas futures traders took notice as the October contract traded into the high $7.60s to start the week before closing out Monday’s regular session at $7.527, up 7.8 cents from Friday’s finish.

Front-month natural gas futures on Friday traded below $8 for the first time since early February as the September contract recorded a low of $7.960 before rebounding to close at $8.092, down 4.4 cents from Thursday’s finish and 15.6 cents below the previous week’s close.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), prompted by dramatic increases in the price of crude oil traded on futures exchanges, announced a number of initiatives that it said “will improve oversight of energy futures markets to ensure they reflect fundamental economic forces of supply and demand, free of manipulation and fraud,” and said it has been investigating U.S. oil markets since December.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), prompted by dramatic increases in the price of crude oil traded on futures exchanges, announced a number of initiatives that it said “will improve oversight of energy futures markets to ensure they reflect fundamental economic forces of supply and demand, free of manipulation and fraud,” and said it has been investigating U.S. oil markets since December.

Production from publicly traded companies, which was up 7% in the first quarter of the year, is being driven by stronger productivity from rapidly growing onshore resource plays like the Barnett Shale, temporarily overcoming the declining initial well productivity trends of core U.S. supply over the past decade, Raymond James & Associates said.

Production from publicly traded companies, which was up 7% in the first quarter of the year, is being driven by stronger productivity from rapidly growing onshore resource plays like the Barnett Shale, temporarily overcoming the declining initial well productivity trends of core U.S. supply over the past decade, Raymond James & Associates said Monday.

Pausing to take stock of Thursday’s meteoric rise in April natural gas futures, tuckered-out traders on Friday traded in a slim $9.320 to $9.405 range before pushing the contract to close at $9.366, down 7.7 cents from Thursday’s close but 17.3 cents higher than the previous Friday’s finish.

The natural gas market is more actively traded than ever could have been imagined at its early stages in the mid-1980s, and FERC’s oversight has to change to accommodate that market, said a top agency official.