Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Natural Gas: "There's something wrong with our bloody ships today, Chatfield"

That was the comment of Admiral Beatty to his Flag Captain at the battle of Jutland after HMS Queen Mary blew up, 31 May 1916. It was the second of his ships to be destroyed in 25 minutes:
16:00 hrs-16:05 hrs, Indefatigable explodes leaving two survivors.
16:25 hrs, Queen Mary disintegrates, twenty survive.
2200 of his sailors vaporized.
Admiral Beatty was a bit of a dimwit so he was, of course, promoted, appointed First Sea Lord and granted an Earldom.

The action in natural gas brought that oft-told-tale to mind.
Combine huge supply, a decrease in demand for U.S. LNG over the last couple weeks and moderating weather forecasts and you get this:

https://www.tradingview.com/x/1ez8Bgln/

almost untradable on the blog, the moves are too fast, even if we were posting hourly. The chart above uses daily bars chosen to show the red "outside candle" on the far right, both higher and lower than the prior day's range.

This is bearish action. On top of that, the gap up gap down which created the island of four bars up around $2.90 is also quite bearish, indicating just about every bullish punter was sucked in until there was no more buying impetus. and woompf!!

Here's the more granular look with the 30-minute bars over the last few days, which it it's own way appears to be a fractal of the longer time period:

https://www.tradingview.com/x/QCD2JavA/

There's a lot of gas around and a market that had been counting on the weather to burn it up is itself getting burned.
 2.543 last, down another 0.041 with the weekly storage report scheduled to be released a day early, Wednesday rather than the usual Thursday.

As noted on Friday Nov. 15:
EIA: Natural Gas Weekly Update
That gap-up from October looks like a tempting target, weather permitting (duh):

Front (December) futures: 2.653 +0.006