The price quote changes since Dec. 31 continue trends that persisted during the 4th quarter of 2012. This table (excerpted from a much larger table in the Reports section showing all 11 contracts) shows the 
price changes for the HCI/CUS 10-city contract since year-end.
While it’s easier to show one table, one has to be careful about assigning observations from this 10-city average to the underlying regions. In fact the trend of “A tale of two regions” has persisted since Q4 and into 2013.
While there have been few trades, quotes on the “warm” states (the 3 California markets, Las Vegas, and Miami) show higher than average increases, while the “cold” states (BOS, NYM, WDC, CHI and DEN) have tended to show lower increases and outright declines.
For example, using YTD changes in the Nov 2014 (X14) contract, bids have improved in LAV (+4.2), LAX (+2.8), MIA (+2.8), SDG (+4.0), and SFR (+6.0). By contrast, BOS (-1.2), CHI (0.6), DEN (0.0), NYM (-3.0), and WDC (-2.0) all show continued relative and/or outright weakness.
So, while the bid on the CUS contract is +2.0 since Dec. 31, only two contracts (LAX, MIA) have price changes that are within two points of that “average” change. We have more of a bi-modal distribution where the mean may not be terribly….meaningful (at least to traders in each region).
A continuation of these trends would suggest that inter-city spread trades within the two larger regions (warm vs. cold) could be done on smaller bid/ask spreads, while inter-regional, inter-city spread trades (warm vs. cold) might have some additional risk (and wider bid/ask spreads) while this divergence plays out.
Please feel free to contact me (johnhdolan@homepricefutures.com) if you have questions on this blog, or the report showing tables for all 11 contracts. I’m open to hearing thoughts/ trade proposals on any inter-city spreads.
That said, I expect that the focus will be on the Feb ’13 contracts that expire on Monday. Bid/ask spreads have compressed to ~2.0 points (on average, CUS =1.2). Inter-city spread trades are another way to play the expiring contracts. I’m open to ideas there also.