Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Updated--Goldman Sachs on Natural Gas

UPDATE: Mind the roll!!! You want the April's, NGJ14, not the March's which cease trading Feb. 27.
Original post:
Barron's Focus on Funds column seems to differ with "Chartology: Natural Gas Appears To Have Found A Short Term Bottom". Hah!
From Barron's:

Natural Gas Plunges Another 11% — and Here’s Why It’s Not Over Yet
After the biggest single-day drop in six years, the market for natural gas futures has slumped another 11% Tuesday morning.
Christian Berthelsen of the Wall Street Journal explains — and remember we’re heading into an options expiry as well as the March futures-market expiry:
Natural gas prices plunged more than 11% in early trading Tuesday as the end to a brutal U.S. winter season approached and the March contract neared expiration, with traders taking the opportunity to square up books. …
“I think what we’re seeing is liquidation of the contract ahead of expiration tomorrow,” said Tom Saal, a broker at INTL FC Stone in Miami. “The weather eventually is going to moderate, and sooner or later the milder temperatures are going to push prices down.”
Now here’s the reason to think there’s more pain ahead: During the commodity’s Polar Vortex-infused surge, the market for longer-dated futures barely budged.

The attached chart from Goldman Sachs shows natural-gas futures maturing in 2015 didn’t participate in the mid-February gains.
Here’s Goldman’s Samantha Dart, Jeffrey Currie, Daniel Quigley and Damien Courvalin on the subject in a Monday evening research note....MORE
My best guess, and that's all anyone is doing although GS takes more words to do it, is a 15% move off today's $4.788 low:
 

And just for the record we can also read a futures curve which is why we were babbling about longer dated paper including the longest dated, equities, on both Jan. 9 and 22, with a repeat on Feb. 20.
So there.
Now I'm going back to my chicken entrails, thank you very much.