The Long Journey Through Winter

After playing UNG, the natural gas ETF (straight up with no leverage in lieu of the elevated BOIL UGAZ ETFs) over the holidays, we elected to sell into strength given the commodity's propensity to see any and all rallies for a good while now fall apart just when it looks most promising for bottom-fishing bulls. 

The reality is that all natural gas ETFs remain rather short-term trading vehicles only, until proven otherwise. 

Indeed, that philosophy has helped even on that attempts where the rallies did not materialize and we had to stop out for a loss. Granted, we did not play natty much in 2017, especially the back end. 

However, now that the commodity is at least showing some signs of life it behooves us to consider another foray into the wilderness. Bear in mind, winter still has a long way to go, and the extreme cold gives natty bulls very little in the way of excuses this time around not to at least sustain some type of relief rally off a ferocious and unforgiving multi-year bear market. 

On the UNG daily chart, updated below, buyers must defend the $22 level (post reverse split now) and preferably push over $22.50 to usher in a new leg higher. 

Elsewhere, equities are mixed as tech tries to offset small cap weakness and some isolated blow-ups like GPRO and SNAP. My GRUB long is getting hit on a Wedbush downgrade, setting up a potentially revealing afternoon in terms of underlying risk appetite to buy any slight weakness in growth plays.