Daily Market Update December 6, 2017

Early Morning Update

The Jan18 natural gas contract is trading up $0.03 at $2.94.  The Jan18 crude contract is down $0.62 at $57.00.

Summary

The NYMEX prompt month continued to slide yesterday, losing another 7.1 cents, settling at $2.914 MMBtu, marking a two day streak with losses totaling 14.7 cents (5%) since Friday’s settle. All 12 months of 2018 NYMEX NG contracts posted losses yesterday, with 2018 settling at $2.8854/MMBtu, the lowest settlement price since 5/18/16. Near-term weather has been a large market driver for the past few months, and with little change to weather outlooks since Friday, most analysts attribute the two day selloff to managed money movement.  The CFTC recently reported ~52,000 NYMEX NG contract decrease in net long positions held by managed money. The number of net long contracts held now rivals the end of October 2017’s low point. If colder forecasts extend further into the future, that could incite managed money to reverse their selloffs. Another near-term bearish factor entered the market recently in the form of LNG export news. Market expectations had been that Dominion’s Cove Point LNG facility would be in service by the end of this year, feed gas was introduced to the newly built LNG plant yesterday, but a report from Bloomberg indicates the in-service date has been postponed. Upon completion, Cove Point expects to have storage capacity of 14.6 Bcf and a daily send-out capacity of 1.8 Bcf/d.

Market Update 1206