Friday, December 18, 2009

Natural Gas

Natural Gas is like the wild, wild West of energy and investing in it can be tricky. We prefer to invest in natural gas companies than the commodity or heaven forbid, the ETF (UNG).

Here is a handy chart that tells the tale well comparing an ETF invested in natural gas companies (FCG) to natural gas futures (pink line) and the contango-suffering natural gas future ETF UNG (purple line).

We don't want to chase price up at this point and are waiting for a pull-back to get into some natural gas companies (LINE PXD FST EOG SWN APC, etc). We are admittedly late to this party (ok, very late -- our focus has been oil and not natural gas) but we would be interested in buying pull-backs to support in this sector. Some would argue that the divergence between the commodity and the stocks at this point illustrates that one should sell the stocks and buy the futures but we'd rather take our chance with buying the stocks on support.