Tue 3 Oct 2006
I was just doing a quick review of the markets, and Gold was certainly not the only commodity that was squelched today… Crude oil was down 3.8%, silver down 5.1%, copper down 4.2%.
The interesting thing is that Natural Gas started the day down quite a bit (around 3%), but rallied into and after the close to finish up 2% for the day. Here is the 30 minute chart to see the price behavior intra-day. While the rest of the commodities were struggling just to pare losses, natty gave a pretty noticable divergent performance. Zooming out to the daily chart for NatGas, it looks like we could have the beginning of a trend change, especially considering how little the drag the rest of the energy/commodities didn’t stop natgas from posting a decent day.
I found a decent index (XNG) that tracks 15 natural gas producers. The XNG finished the day down 2.6% despite the 2% gains in the natgas futures. Likewise Canadian trust companies that are heavily weighted towards natural gas reserves (like AAV) finished the day down ~5%. If there are a couple more days of strength in the futures market, we could see some of these stocks turn around.