Twain

To borrow from Mark Twain, rumors of the futures uptrend’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. One day ahead of expiration, November futures reversed course from Monday’s decline on speculation that Thursday morning might see a significantly lower injection than anticipated. The prompt month posted a 51.2-cent jump to settle at $8.402.

To borrow from Mark Twain, rumors of the futures uptrend’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. One day ahead of expiration, November futures reversed course from Monday’s decline on speculation that Thursday morning might see a significantly lower injection than anticipated. The prompt month posted a 51.2-cent jump to settle at $8.402.

Borrowing from Mark Twain in summing up the current wholesale natural gas market and where it is headed, DC Public Service Commission’s (PSC) Dr. Jeffrey V. Conopask, quoted, “Predicting is pretty risky business, especially about the future.” He said he believes wholesale prices for the 2003-2004 heating season “continue to suggest that natural gas expenses will be higher for consumers than those of the most recent winter.”

To paraphrase a quotation attributed to Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens), everybody talks about the weather, but nobody seems to agree about the forecasts. Will El Nino warm up the Northeast and cool off the South and wreak havoc on utility and natural gas earnings? Will the Pacific Northwest have less rain this winter? And, most important, will the snow stop long enough in the Northeast to shovel the walkways clear for a day?

To paraphrase a quotation attributed to Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens), everybody talks about the weather, but nobody seems to agree about the forecasts. Will El Nino warm up the Northeast and cool off the South and wreak havoc on utility and natural gas earnings? Will the Pacific Northwest have less rain this winter? And, most important, will the snow stop long enough in the Northeast to shovel the walkways clear for a day?

As Mark Twain once observed, everybody likes to talk about theweather, and that was especially true in the gas trading communityTuesday. With the official calendar start of winter still more thana month away, it seemed like winter has already begun in almostevery region. The predictable effect was to keep both cash andfutures prices pushing higher, with the screen scaling previouslyunknown heights.

A popular Mark Twain quotation goes, “Everybody talks about theweather but nobody does anything about it.” Well, utilities andend-users don’t want anybody doing anything at all about theweather because it was the primary reason (again, for the umpteenthtime) for prices to return to double-digit descents Friday in mostcases.

Mark Twain once said that while everybody talks about theweather, nobody does anything about it. And although that may haveheld true on a 19th century Mississippi Riverboat, it was not thecase in the natural trading pit Tuesday as traders bid up pricesthroughout the session on the news two new tropical systems hadformed in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.