Natural Gas Price Forecast for 2024 – Expecting no Fireworks for Natgas

Natural Gas Forecast Video for 2024

Natural gas markets have been very noisy during the year 2023, as the beginning of the year had seen the end of the massive selloff that happened at the end of 2022. In fact, the market was still cut in half in just a short couple of months. That being said, the market stabilized a bit after that and even bounced rather significantly. However, I think at this point it’s safe to say that natural gas markets have settled into a bit of a range.

2023, The Year That Wasn’t

2023 started to look really strong for natural gas somewhere around April or May. After all, traders started to think about the overall macroeconomic landscape, and the reality is that the questions out there remain as to how the Europeans were going to get natural gas after the Nordstream II pipeline was sabotaged. At that point, it was very likely that we would see a huge move higher, as the Europeans would have to scramble to see some type of supply for the winter. All things being equal, this is a market that should have gone much higher, especially as we also had a coup d’état in Niger and other countries in West Africa that could have cut off supply to the EU as well. However, the winter hasn’t necessarily been overly cold, and therefore it took some of the sting out of the lack of supply.

Furthermore, we have seen several other factors come into play such as plenty of supply in the United States, and of course the winter in the US has been extraordinarily warm, and as we continue to see the temperatures stay elevated, it would take an absolute disaster in the northeastern part of the United States to cause natural gas to have any significant bounce.

Technical Analysis

As far as the technical analysis is concerned, it does look like the natural gas markets are trying to carve out some type of a larger range, as the $2.00 level underneath has offered support the last time we got there, and it does suggest that the level might be the bottom of the market at this point. On the other hand, if we were to continue to go higher, the $3.33 level has been a major resistance barrier as well, so I think we are going to stay in this range for the year.

Forecast

I believe at this point, the natural gas markets will continue to see short-term pullbacks that remain a bit of a base building exercise. The $2.00 level underneath is what I think is going to be the floor, and therefore it’s difficult to see this market dropping below there, at least not for any significant amount of time. At the same time, I think we are just simply going to see a lot of back and forth between there and the $3.33 level, as denoted by the rectangle on the chart.

I’m not expecting fireworks, and I think that 2024 is setting up for a range bound market and not only natural gas, but probably multiple other markets. Quite frankly, there’s nothing out there that suggests we are going to see some type of major shift for the longer term, as natural gas does like to trade in a range, and I do that will continue to be the case going forward. I have no interest in trying to get too cute here, I just recognize that this is a situation where playing the range on the weekly chart might be the way to go in 2024.