Trades

Heavy snow, blustery winds and the highest natural gas spot price ever recorded by NGI marked a day of extremes in Thursday’s market. Driven by cash prices north of $100/MMBtu in the Northeast, NGI’s National Spot Gas Average climbed into the double digits, adding $5.94 to average $16.78/MMBtu.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s $25 million swaps threshold level for trades involving “special entities,” such as publicly owned utilities, will drive non-bank firms out of the natural gas and electricity markets, leaving trading to big banks like J.P. Morgan, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, said a major producer group Monday.

Once the spin-off of El Paso Corp.’s exploration and production (E&P) business is completed, the yet-to-be-named independent producer will be formidable competition in some of the prolific unconventional natural gas and oil plays in the United States, CEO Doug Foshee said.

North America led the global upstream merger and acquisition (M&A) marketplace in 3Q2010 with 100 transactions totaling $18.1 billion, or 41% of the $43.8 billion in a total of 154 trades worldwide, according to a tally by PLS Inc. in conjunction with its international partner, Derrick Petroleum Services.

North America led the global upstream merger and acquisition (M&A) marketplace in 3Q2010 with 100 transactions totaling $18.1 billion, or 41% of the $43.8 billion in a total of 154 trades worldwide, according to a tally by PLS Inc. in conjunction with its international partner, Derrick Petroleum Services.

April natural gas futures plunged at the close of trading Friday amidst a flurry of spread trades that sent out bearish vibrations and cast doubt about further gains in the April contract. April futures lost 6.3 cents to close at $3.932, and May dropped 4.9 cents to close at $4.006. April crude oil shed 78 cents to close at $46.25/bbl.

Incredible as it may seem, at least one Rockies trader was willing to let gas go for the weekend at a penny Friday. IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) reported that a 1-cent deal was among 84 trades done on its on-line system. Obviously very little changed hands at such a low level, as other Opal quotes on ICE ran as high as $1.31 and the point averaged about 95 cents Friday in NGI’s survey.

The IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) said last week that “in the next several weeks” it will begin supplying data on large individual natural gas trades on its system to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as it had been requested to do two months ago.

Shifting from the current system of voluntary reporting of fixed-price trades to published indexes to a mandatory reporting system could significantly reduce market liquidity, would be costly and could undo the improvement in the price indexes that has occurred over the past couple of years, natural gas producer, industrial consumer and pipeline groups told FERC Friday.