While gas-producing companies have been hit by the slide in oil prices, Matt Badiali, author of Stansberry Resource Report, one of the biggest resource newsletter services in the world for retail investors, believes gas has held up better than oil and the signs look good that it will only get better.

“People have sold it off, and no one is really thinking about [gas],” he said. “They’re too focused on the oil sell-off.

“There’s already an uptrend in the price [of gas], and we’re heading into winter. It’s going to keep getting colder and consumption is going to go up. That should make natural gas stocks rally from here.”

Gas prices have dipped around 30%, from $4.5 per million British thermal unit this US summer to $3/MMBtu today, though Badiali said natural gas stocks get dumped for the same reasons as oil – because it’s hard to disentangle oil producers and gas producers

“It’s hard to unravel which stocks produce natural gas and which ones produce oil, because most of these companies produce a mix of both types of fuel,” he said.

While some analysts believe companies more strongly weighted towards natural gas should hold up better, Badiali said anecdotal evidence did not support that notion.

“You have companies like Southwestern, or Range Resources whose production is mostly natural gas; and yet, their shares are down with the rest of the index,” he said – which he said was a typical market reaction.

Markets tend to punish any stock related to a crashing asset without analysing their specific level of exposure.

“There’s a funny analogy that occurred during the Mexican peso crisis. Every currency in the world with the name ‘peso’ also fell,” he said, citing the Argentine peso and the Philippine peso as examples. “Investors weren’t discerning about which ‘peso’ to sell, even though they are unrelated.”

Badiali said this was a good set-up for a short-term bet on natural gas.

“The fear will come out of the natural gas market eventually. If we have a cold snap in the Northeast like we did last year, where we saw natural gas prices spike up to $7/MMBtu, we’ll certainly see people pile back into these stocks.”

Still, US natural gas prices falling $3/MMBtu for the first time since 2012 had some believing this was just the beginning.

Nick Butler, energy policy adviser at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and a senior adviser to Coller Capital, Linton Capital and Corporate Value Associates, said on his regular Financial Times blog that two other factors suggested a “continued and worldwide decline” in gas prices this year – and they have nothing to do with the oil price crash, Russia or OPEC.

“First, in Europe in particular, gas supply contracts — for instance from Gazprom into Germany — are tied to the oil price,” he said.

“The link is historic and is gradually giving way to direct gas-to-gas competition. But the older, longer term contracts remain in place for now and that means that a radical downward shift in prices will occur through the coming year.

“Secondly, after years of uncertainty since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, there are signs that Japan is ready to accept the gradual reintroduction of nuclear power.

“The initial steps will be small — perhaps just one or two reactors at first. But even that will be sufficient to undermine gas prices in Asia which rose at times to almost $20/MMBtu as Japan was forced to substitute imported gas for nuclear.”

He said each nuclear station brought back online would reduce demand for gas, and just as prices surged in 2011 now he expects them to slip back.

Butler cited a Reuters survey of some serious analysts, including Wood Mackenzie, which forecast a fall of up to 30% in Asian natural gas prices in 2015.

He cautioned, however, that unlike the oil market, “none of this has anything to do with the collapse of a producers’ cartel – or depending on your world view, with a dastardly plan to use falling prices to undermine one political enemy or another”.

“Nor does it have anything to do with Ukraine or the relations between Russia and Europe.

“There is no gas cartel and no producer has the power to set prices. The falling price is simply a matter of supply and demand.

“Supply is strong — driven on by high prices in the last few years and by the US shale revolution. Demand on the other hand is fragile and in Europe is being continuously eroded by subsidised renewables.”