What is natural gas trading? The usual answer is a chart of a fuel: you buy when it is cold and sell when the storage tanks are full. I suppose that is an answer too.
But for me the first thing to learn is that there is no single price of gas. On 5 November 2026 one MMBtu of gas cost $2.98 in Louisiana and about $28.45 in the Netherlands — the same molecule, nine and a half times the price. A natural gas trader who does not know which of these prices is on his screen is not trading gas. He is guessing.
| Price | 5 November 2026 | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Henry Hub, USA | $2.98 per MMBtu | US weather, US storage, exports from the Gulf Coast |
| TTF, Europe | €87.98 per MWh — about $28 per MMBtu | LNG ships, the war with Iran, European storage at 75% |
| Your broker’s CFD | follows one of the two, usually Henry Hub | plus the broker’s spread, swap and roll |
Three prices for one fuel
The first price is Henry Hub — a pipeline junction in Erath, Louisiana, where the NYMEX futures contract is settled. This is the price most CFD brokers copy into MetaTrader under names like NATGAS, NGAS or XNGUSD. The front-month contract closed at $2.98 per MMBtu on 5 November 2026, and the 52-week range runs from $2.52 on 24 April to $7.46 on 28 January.
The second price is TTF — the Dutch hub that sets the price for all of Europe. It is quoted in euros per megawatt-hour, and one MWh is 3.412 MMBtu. On 6 November 2026 TTF closed near €87 per MWh after a 15% fall in one week, the worst week since early 2025. One week before that it had passed €100 for the first time since 2022.
The reasons are not American at all: tankers attacked near the Strait of Hormuz, QatarEnergy keeping its force majeure on deliveries until at least 31 December 2026, and European storage only 74.6% full on 25 October against a five-year average near 86%.
The third price is the one in your terminal. It is a contract for difference, so it follows one of the two benchmarks — almost always Henry Hub — and then adds the broker’s own spread, an overnight swap and a roll from one futures month to the next. This is the price you pay, and it is the only one of the three you can read in the Specification window of MT5.
Which of the three do you trade? Gas trading is simpler once you accept this. You do not trade gas. You trade one benchmark, through one contract, with one broker, and each of these three can move your result on its own.
The gas year
Natural gas fundamentals come down to a calendar. From April to October the United States pumps gas into underground storage. From November to March it pulls gas out. Every Thursday at 15:30 GMT the Energy Information Administration says how many billion cubic feet went in or came out the week before, and for one minute that number is the whole market.
This year the heating season started with 3,801 Bcf in storage as of 30 October — about 2% above the five-year average, but 147 Bcf below the same week of 2025. The last injection of the season was 77 Bcf against a forecast of 81. Small miss, small reaction: Henry Hub spent the week between $2.86 and $2.98.
Why does Europe pay nine times more if the fuel is the same? There is one more layer under the calendar. Gas does not move by ship easily, so the US market and the European market are joined only through LNG export plants on the Gulf Coast. When those plants run at full capacity — and in 2026 they do — extra demand in Europe cannot pull more gas out of America. That is why TTF can double while Henry Hub stays flat. The pipe between the two prices is full.
The Thursday number
Most guides on how to trade natural gas tell you the same thing: wait for the storage report on Thursday, compare the actual with the forecast, and trade the surprise. Many traders do exactly that, and the first five minutes after 15:30 GMT are the most crowded of the week.
Is that the right number to trade? For me the Thursday number is the least interesting number in the report. It is one week of weather, already in the price by the time it prints. The number I read first is the gap to the five-year average — plus 2% now — and the number I read second is the gap between the front month and the next month on the futures curve. That gap tells you whether the market thinks the tightness is real or temporary.
In January it told the whole story.
What January taught
On 28 January 2026 the February futures contract at Henry Hub settled at $7.46 per MMBtu. The March contract settled the same day at $3.73. One day apart in delivery, two prices apart in value — the widest gap between the first and second month since at least 2014, according to the EIA.
Winter Storm Fern had frozen wells across the producing basins, taking about 12% of US output offline just as heating demand peaked. Cash gas for weekend delivery went above $28 on 23 January and traded as high as $53 in places.
What happened to a long position that night? The February contract then expired. Anyone holding a CFD through that expiry woke up priced off March, three dollars and seventy cents lower. That is not a crash. That is a roll, and it is written in every broker’s specification, but it reads very differently at $7.46 than at $2.98.
This is the kind of month that makes natural gas trading what it is. The front month rose 140% in seven trading days and gave most of it back in the next three weeks. A currency pair does not do this. Gas does it every few winters.
Money per move
The NYMEX contract is 10,000 MMBtu, and the smallest tick is $0.001 — ten dollars per tick. A move of $0.10 is $1,000 on one contract. Most MT5 brokers copy this size for one lot of their gas CFD, so on 0.01 lot the same $0.10 move is $10, and on a cent account it is ten cents.
What does that mean in a real month? Put January into that arithmetic. The jump on 27 January alone was about $1.48, from $5.30 to $6.78. On one full lot that is $14,800 — more than the usual margin for the position. On 0.01 lot it is $148, and on a $100 cent account the same move is $1.48, which is still a 1.5% day from a single bar. Position size on gas is not a detail. It is the strategy.
If you trade natural gas, you need to know the pip value before you know the direction. Our pip article walks through the same arithmetic for currency pairs. For gas, replace 100,000 units with 10,000 MMBtu and the logic holds.
Gas inside MetaTrader
I write robots for currency pairs. Our Forex V Portfolio runs on 14 pairs and no commodities, and gas is one reason that decision stays. A robot that trades H1 bars assumes the bars are continuous. A gas CFD has a daily break in the session, a roll from one futures month to the next, and a spread that opens wide at 15:30 GMT every Thursday.
Each of these shows up in a backtest as a gap that was never tradable, and a backtest with untradable gaps is a lie that flatters you.
Does that mean no tool at all? Indicators are a different matter. The Smart Trend Trading System reads any symbol MT5 can open, gas included, because a trend filter does not care what the asset is. The decision it cannot make for you is whether the trend on your screen is a weather trend, a storage trend or a roll artifact. That part is still yours.
One more thing about the terminal. Open the Specification window for your gas symbol and read three lines before anything else: contract size, swap long and swap short, and the trading hours. The swap on gas is often ten times the swap on EUR/USD, and a position held through the roll can lose more to the swap than to the market.
A natural gas trading strategy
I do not think natural gas commodity trading strategies need to be complicated. They need to be in the right season and in the right size. The checks I would run before any trade in natural gas are these, in order.
The first check — which benchmark. If your CFD follows Henry Hub, the Iran war and the Qatari force majeure are background, not signal. Read the US weather forecast instead. If it follows TTF, do the opposite.
The second check — where in the gas year you are. Withdrawal season rewards long trades on cold surprises and punishes short trades held into a storm. Injection season is the mirror image. The April low of $2.52 and the January high of $7.46 are the same market in two seasons.
The third check — the roll date. Your broker publishes it. A long position held across the roll in a month like January 2026 lost $3.73 of value overnight, not because the market fell, but because the contract changed.
The fourth check — the size. Take the biggest one-day move of the last year, $1.48, multiply by the lot you plan to trade, and ask whether your account survives it twice. If the answer is no, the lot is wrong, whatever the signal says.
The fifth check — the Thursday clock. Either be flat at 15:30 GMT or have the stop far enough that the spread widening does not take it. Many stops on gas are hit by the broker’s spread, not by the price.
Five checks, no indicator among them. The indicator comes after, and in my experience it adds less to a gas trade than the calendar does.
Natural gas origination
There is a whole side of natural gas trading that never reaches a retail screen. Natural gas origination is the business of buying gas at the wellhead and selling it to a utility or a factory, with pipelines, storage leases and credit lines in between. The people who do it move physical molecules and hedge in the futures market we trade.
The book natural gas traders on that side have read for thirty years is Fletcher Sturm’s Trading Natural Gas: A Nontechnical Guide. It is still the clearest explanation of why the Thursday number exists at all, and of how commodity trading natural gas differs from trading a currency.
Why does this matter to a trader with a $500 account? Because the futures price you see is the hedge of that physical trade, not the trade itself. When the physical market seizes — frozen wells in January, a force majeure in Qatar — the hedge price goes wherever it must. Trading in natural gas means trading the shadow of a market you cannot see. The shadow is faithful most days and wild on the days that matter.
The next three dates
The EIA publishes its monthly outlook on 10 November. In October it had Henry Hub averaging $3.30 for the fourth quarter and $3.47 for the first quarter of 2027, and a lower full-year average of $3.16 for 2027 as production grows. The November numbers will say whether a $2.98 market has already priced that in.
The next storage report is 12 November, and the first withdrawal of the season is usually in the week after. And 31 December is the day the Qatari force majeure either ends or extends — I do not know which, and I am not sure the TTF price at €87 knows either.
The benchmark, the season, the roll, the size and the clock — all of this is natural gas trading, and none of it is a chart pattern. The more of these five you check before you open the position, the steadier the account is on the one Thursday a year when the number is very wrong.
Prices and dates in this article come from the EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook of October 2026 and its note on the January 2026 futures gap; the EIA Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report of 5 November 2026; the Henry Hub spot series on FRED; Reuters reporting of 28 January 2026 on the 140% seven-day move; ICE Endex TTF settlements and Gas Infrastructure Europe storage data as reported by Trading Economics on 6 November 2026.
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