For you non-sailors: luffing is when the sail flaps back and forth, useless, caught between conflicting winds. It’s a sign that you’re going nowhere fast. Pretty much describes the stock market right now. Or any of the commodity or futures markets.

Right now, the markets aren’t fulfilling their purpose: allowing people to invest in, and profit from, well run businesses. The near-daily hundreds-of-points drops and rises are the result of short-timers and market gamers, looking to beat the odds and working on an investment timeline of days and weeks, not years.

Same for NYMEX. After a few weeks of following the fundamentals, natural gas prices are back to luffing, tossed about by multiple, independent forces. So we see that, despite an unexpectedly large withdrawal from storage (check the NYMEX), prices are down across the board.

It’s the long game that beats the house

We’ve been talking about hedging your bets the last few weeks. This week we want to talk about the one hedge everyone has: intelligence.

While NYMEX prices give you a short-term picture of the natural gas market, let’s also remember the long-term view. Click here to see the history of NYMEX prices since 1991. You can clearly see that, beyond the spikes, the overall trend is up. While the current under-$7.00 prices seem like a bargain compared to July, they’re well above prices from five and ten years ago. And we know where they’re going.

How they’re going to get there is anyone’s guess. There are too many forces in play at this point: the domestic market, the international market, the domestic economy, the international economy, the energy fundamentals, the role of speculators. Utilities don’t know where prices are going to be in six months or a year. Providers don’t know either.

So they hedge their bets by tightening credit, limiting terms, and pushing margins on locked-in rates. Cost Containment Intl. is proving more useful than ever to our customers as good deals become harder to negotiate. This is usually a fairly quiet time in energy…not this year.

But here’s where your intelligence, and your long-term view gives you another hedge. It’s energy conservation. That unglamorous, unpublicized, “eat less, exercise more, get enough sleep” side of your overall energy picture. Cost Containment can go beyond price reduction and simple strategic planning: we have a variety of energy audits that can help you eliminate waste, tighten down use and raise efficiency.

The assumption is that conservation means added expense, productivity loss and decreased comfort. Not so. We usually find conservation measures that can be instituted at minimal cost and with minimal impact. There is always low-hanging fruit. And return on investment happens faster with every inevitable upturn in prices, because energy not used is always free.

Hedge your bets by knowing your options. Cost Containment Intl. has plans for your long-term success.

Check the NYMEX