Energy futures prices are climbing back this evening. What's known as a "short squeeze" may develop if even a little bad news not already known shows up on the wires tomorrow... sellers were hard at it on Friday and some carried through on Sunday.

NGX5 is now trading above Friday's close.

Its not a reversal, but the potential is certainly there.

Having said that, my take is that there is too-little information to make a truly informed decision right now, just like at the start of last week there was too-little known about Rita to justify the enormous spike the news of the storm caused.

I won't be too surprised if energy markets chop about a bit without selling off dramatically, until more is known... and the known is bad enough. Even normal refinery restart procedures will impact supply of products; there's bound to be more NG processing plant outages than before the storm; and off-shore production will take days to even recover to Katrina levels plus there virtually has to be some long term  or extra-long term impact from Rita to add onto the long term Katrina impact.

Futures traders don't act on perfect info; due to the leverage inherent in the instrument, they act quick, when right but especially when wrong.

I've no idea what we face tomorrow or the next day but will not be surprised to see energy futures trading higher. Few seem to expect that, and often when that's the case, price heads where its least expected to go.

Natural gas this evening is trading below the peaks reached about a month ago with Katrina.  Therefore, if the market was efficient, it is saying Rita caused no supply disruptions at all.

Of course, the market is not totally efficient, influenced by speculation, subject to changes in exchange rules and 'force majueres', and even possibly direct government intervention - which by its nature would be secret and impossible to directly prove.

Even so, I don't see NG prices headed lower without a serious recession [ps I don't trade futures].

Again, whether or not price is below the Katrina peak from late August is irrelevant at this point -- price remains in an up trend.

http://www.trendvue.com/charts/2005/09/tv20050925-01.gif

(overnight NGV5 is a 12.22 at present)

An uptrend is characterized by higher swing highs and higher swing lows. In order to break this up trend - in other words, to reverse it - price will have to start making lower swing lows and lower swing highs, under the 10.50 (approx) levels.

And it will have to do that leading into the winter.

We can almost guarantee that is not going to happen.

So, at best (if one doesn't like higher prices), price will find some level of support and chop around for the fall and winter; at worse, supply has been damaged to the point where it will not meet demand and we'll all be notching the heaters down.

Price currently tells us so far that the latter scenario still remains possible, if not more probable than the former.

And there you go... price held above the Katrina-induced gap (that's very, very, bullish.. frankly I'm surprised it didn't at least try to poke below that lower support line if even for part of the session yesterday) and bounced right back to where it broke down last week. Step one in price recovery complete... now it has to break above the 13.10 area and hold.

http://www.trendvue.com/charts/2005/09/tv20050926-40.gif