Daily Market Update March 9, 2017

Early Morning Update

The Apr17 natural gas contract is trading up $0.03 to $2.93.  The Apr17 crude contract is down $0.80 at $49.48.

Summary

The market has been fairly choppy over the last several days, as weather forecasts have turned colder in the near-term, followed by much-above-average weather for the latter half of the month.  Trading Wednesday started the day on an upward trend, topping out up 12.1 cents at mid-day, and eventually closed 7.7 cents higher than the previous session.  The strong snap of cold weather is expected to remain in effect through the weekend, before giving way to a warming trend that will have folks reminiscing about spring-like weather once again for most of the Northern tier.  This week, the market is expecting a 62 Bcf withdrawal from storage, which compares to a 63 Bcf pull last year and a 136 Bcf five-year average.  Given what is known, the end-of-season storage projection is reduced slightly to roughly 2.1 Tcf, still a 300 Bcf surplus to the five-year average.

Market Update 030917

Market Settles 030817