It was a typical summer Friday in the natural gas market, with prompt month prices trading with a 3-cent range and settling down around just half a percent on the day. 

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Though we have seen some significant heat across Texas the last couple of days that is expected to linger into the weekend, it will be difficult to sustain over the coming couple of weeks, keeping movements in the natural gas market minimal following yesterday's bullish EIA data miss. 

For the week the August natural gas contract logged a meager gain of .2%, and over the last month is down significantly. Still, after a few weeks of steady selling bulls were likely happy to just be able to stop the bleeding. 

Our readers were not too surprised about prices attempting to find a bottom and stabilizing this week, as in our Weekly Natural Gas Report on Monday we outlined that a generally range-bound week was likely with some slight risk lower. The risk lower was realized early yesterday before the bullish EIA print pushed us solidly back into our range. 

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Interestingly, today we saw the largest losses for both the front of the strip and J-V9, however, with the fall and winter strip being more firm. The result was a larger move lower in Q/V. 

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In our intraday Note of the Day for clients today we broke down what we see this signaling for forward price risk in the natural gas market, and updated our natural gas sentiment and market overview in our Pre-Close Update. Our Note of the Day also looked at what have continued to be very strong power burns, which have appeared even more impressive in the face of strong nuclear generation through the summer. 

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Compared to last year we have accordingly seen far less gas burn covering for nuclear plant outages, though the differences are far lower in the summer (per usual) as opposed to what we saw back in May and June. 

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