Locator: 49802B.
Quote of the day: "It's AMD's day today (after Intel's conference call yesterday)" -- Jim Cramer.
CSX: up 3% in pre-market trading; Cramer says BNSF will tie up with CSX. Berkshire Hathaway's new CEO needs a win. Desperately.
BRK-B: pre-market, down again. Down half-a-percent in pre-market; could open well below $485. Its 52-week high is 542. BRK-B is down 12% from its 52-week high. Ouch. The GOAT.
Cramer: watch Gaza. A lot of money could pour into Gaza. Dubai has a lot of money. So many story lines. Could this be a Trump legacy? Board of Peace. This could be so big it could rival the UN. Reuters headline. Talk about a loaded / prejudicial headline: why would Reuters be concerned about a Trump initiative rivaling the UN? Oh, that's right.
Exhibit A: What country currently runs the UN Security Council?
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $60.81. Up 2.44% overnight; up $1.45. Geo-political or weather?
New wells reporting:
- Sunday, January 25, 2026: 41 for the month, 41 for the quarter, 41 for the year,
- 41384, conf, Hess, GN-Stundal-158-97-1819H-3,
- 41351, conf, Hess, GO-Dustin Brose-156-98-2932H-4,
- Saturday, January 24, 2026: 39 for the month, 39 for the quarter, 39 for the year,
- 41308, conf, BR, Sandie 3A MBH,
- 40079, conf, Devon, Cuda 14-26F 5H,
- Friday, January 23, 2026: 37 for the month, 37 for the quarter, 37 for the year,
- 40078, conf, Devon, Cuda 15-27F 4H,
- 39802, conf, BR, Carlsbad 4B,
- 36616, conf, BR, Sandie 2C-MBH,
RBN Energy: will the storm set to slam the south lead to a winter storm Uri reprise? Link here. Archived.
The natural gas market was roiled this week by the prospect of severe winter weather set to sweep across the country. The placid first half of January, with temperatures far above seasonal averages, now looks set to turn downright frigid from Friday through Sunday. The storm, now known as Winter Storm Fern, is forecast to leave a swath of snow and ice across the middle of the U.S. from New Mexico to Delaware. This has sent futures soaring this week and triggered market memories of another storm with an even shorter name, Uri, that wreaked havoc on the gas market five years ago. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss the market’s jump in advance of Fern’s arrival and whether its effects might rival the tremendous dislocations caused by Uri.
The natural gas futures market was still in the doldrums on Friday, January 16, when the front-month February contract settled at $3.103/MMBtu, 88 cents lower than where the contract was trading when it became the prompt month at the end of December. Bearishness was the norm in the first half of January due to the unseasonably warm weather. According to data from RBN’s U.S. NATGAS Billboard, the average national temperature was 47.2 degrees for the January 1-15 period, 4.3 degrees higher than the average for the prior 10 years. As we would expect, unseasonably high temperatures for a peak winter month led to lower-than-typical natural gas usage. Total U.S. demand for natural gas in the first half of January averaged a paltry 101.7 Bcf/d. (The same period in 2025 averaged 124.2 Bcf/d.) Only record-high LNG feedgas kept supply from exceeding demand during those weeks, signaling a very loose market for a period that normally sees high withdrawals from storage.
As of January 16, the general view was that the second half of January would be colder than the first half. At RBN, we had anticipated that the average national temperature would be 2.9 degrees below normal for the back half of the month — cold, but not enough to significantly alter the gas balance — and our forecasts showed the gas surplus to the 5-year average declining by only 11 Bcf through February 6 (left side of Figure 1 below). The gas market entered the long Martin Luther King Day holiday weekend in a tranquil state but forecast changes over those three days sent futures into a frenzy when trading resumed.
