Natural gas epitomized the 'widow maker' trade of the 2000s after a series of big bets went wrong in the notoriously volatile commodity.

Now that gas has been tamed, trading in a narrow range that bores hedge fund managers, cotton has taken its place.

The fibre claimed its latest, and so far its highest-profile victim so far on Wednesday when Ricardo Leiman, chief executive of Noble Group, resigned hours after the Singapore-listed trading house reported its first quarterly loss in 14 years, mostly in cotton. Earlier this year Glencore fired Mark Allen, its head of cotton, after losing money in the commodity in the first half of 2011.

The wave of losses and resignations comes after another episode in 2008, when a spike in cotton prices took several historic names, including merchants Dunavant Enterprises of Memphis and the U.S. and Australian affiliates of Paul Reinhart, a Swiss cotton trader founded in the 18th century.

These kinds of casualties were once reserved for gas, which due to seasonal demand and vulnerability to hurricanes was the most treacherous of markets for most of the 2000s. Brian Hunter, star trader of Amaranth Advisors, lost more than $6-billion in 2006 betting on gas. A year later the Bank of Montreal suffered a $680-million loss linked to natural gas. The extreme moves made billionaires too, notably John Arnold, the founder of Houston-based energy hedge fund Centaurus Advisors.

The passing of the widow makerΆs crown comes down to fundamentals. The shale boom and growth in underground storage has softened natural gasΆs vulnerability to external shocks. Hurricanes, which last inflicted major damage on the hydrocarbon-rich Gulf of Mexico coast in 2008, are less of a factor as supplies grow inland.

Cotton meanwhile trebled to more than $2 a pound earlier this year thanks to low stocks, strong demand from Asian mills and supply shortfalls due to floods in Pakistan and an export ban in India last year.

Prices have finally steadied at about $1 a pound, but the damage is done. Some farmers who last year promised to sell crops at 80 to 90 cents a pound, backed out of deals when prices surged, leaving companies such as Noble and Allenberg Cotton, a unit of Louis Dreyfus, stuck with costly hedges. When prices declined, mills backed away from purchases.

Or as Noble said in its results: “After the unprecedented increase in cotton prices, there was a level of systematic default by farmers particularly in the U.S., forcing Noble to have to cover physical deliveries to customers by purchasing cotton in the spot market at elevated prices. The recent fall in prices led to credit exposures on customers who had purchased cotton at forward prices well above the spot prices.”