Sunday Morning Note ...

Sunday mornings are normally the time that I sit back, make an extra pot of coffee, and catch up on some of the past week's data.  Since I am doing them in any event I thought I would start throwing them up here, both as another place to capture them and to make them available to anyone else who may find them of value.

Here are what the numbers represent:

Oil.  The numbers are the Friday close price, as reported on the CME Group website for the indicated month (in this case, September) for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent for the immediate, one-year, two-year and, just for grins, five-years forward.

Natural Gas.  The Henry Hub (HH) price is the same as for oil, the Friday close price, as reported on the CME Group website for the indicated month for the immediate, one-year, two-year and, again just for grins, five-years forward.  Because there is no publicly reported regular market price for Asian LNG I include a couple of numbers for reference.  The first is the price reported publicly on the CME Group website for Platt's JKM (Japan/Korea Marker).  Platt's JKM is regularly reported privately as part of Platt's subscription services.  I am not certain where CME Group obtains the data they use, but it is close enough to actual to serve my Sunday morning purposes.  The second number I include for reference ("BGK") is one of my own design, and simply is the average of the prices reported for the same time period of the WTI and Brent prices, divided by 5.55 (the number of million BTU's contained in a standard barrel of oil), in other words the average oil futures price for the same time period reported on a per MMBTU basis.  While I certainly would not trade on this number, it captures at least some of the JKM market characteristics, which generally price LNG as a factor of oil prices, and indicates directionally where LNG prices might be headed if they continue to be based on oil. (I would note that both the Singapore and Japanese OTC Exchange are currently attempting to develop liquid markets in LNG futures, but have not yet started publicly reporting the resulting prices.)

The final piece is any other data (or data related information) that I picked up and put in my "read later" folder during the week.  This week a report from earlier in the week by the Financial Times ("Oil falls to $50 a barrel") made it into the folder and is included here.