Unclear

Cautious selling was met with light, scale-down buying pressureat the New York Mercantile Exchange Friday. And when the dust hadcleared and all the orders counted, both bulls and bears couldglean something positive from the session. Bulls were quick topoint to the $2.225 settlement, a 0.7-cent advance for the day.Bears, on the other hand, touted Friday’s lower high and lower lowas an indication the downtrend was still intact. Estimated volumeof 77,538 confirmed the heavy activity in the pit.

Feeding off positive momentum from Wednesday’s active tradingsession, natural gas futures trundled higher yesterday as tradersgauged the persistent issues of storage and weather. And while thatfollow-through was enough to boost the prompt January contract up7.4 cents to $2.064 for the day, 4 cents of that was notched in theWednesday night Access session, leaving some bulls to suggest thatyesterday’s movement was disappointing.

Despite it remaining unclear Friday whether Tropical Depression8 (expected to become Tropical Storm Hermine by Saturday) wouldhave substantive and lasting impact on Gulf of Mexico production,just the possibility was enough to propel cash prices upward byanywhere from a dime to 20 cents at eastern points. Westernmarkets, more removed from the Gulf supply outages, also rose butmostly by a dime or less. The double-digit uptick on the futuresscreen did more than anything fundamental to boost numbers in theWest, a marketer said.