Last week we had the advance stop order shake out warning courtesy of berserk inverted fractal HFT algos which were completely not accidental. Now we get the real thing. Just out from Goldman's Samantha Dart: "NYMEX natural gas prices have rallied 12% in the past three weeks, largely driven by strong cooling-related demand for natural gas on the back of significantly warmer-than-average temperatures, and exacerbated by the still high nuclear outages. However, these factors are transient in nature, and their support to generation demand for natural gas will likely diminish in the coming weeks as the weather normalizes and nuclear power plants come out of maintenance...However, even after taking these transient issues into account, the supply and demand balance for gas was surprisingly resilient in May, especially given the continued impressive gains in shale gas production. We believe the production growth has been largely accommodated by additional strength in generation demand resulting from a wide discount of US natural gas prices relative to coal generation costs, as well as by higher pipeline exports out of the United States. We view the current high prices as unsustainable. In addition to the transient nature of the demand support from weather and nuclear outages, we expect the underlying balance to soften in response to the higher prices, as production growth is further incentivized and price-induced coal-to-gas substitution diminishes. Accordingly, we recommend going short the October 2011 NYMEX Natural Gas contract, at an initial price of $4.84/mmBtu." Translation: Goldman is now buying nat gas.



