US/EU natural gas curve trading
Curious if anyone has resources on trading the NG forward curve. I know people try to forecast supply/demand by looking at inventory, weather, pipeline flows etc. but (again not an expert) this seems to me more focused on prompt date NG (or trading the front spread). How do people think about trading deferred parts of the curve? Obviously weather forecasting is garbage beyond a couple weeks - do people look at other fundamental data sources (e.g. basis spreads) or is this more of a flows game at the back of the curve?
The curve is still being traded on fundies forecast (people really underestimate how good our models are at predicting quite far out). If you're trading a RV book its very common to have positions that include parts on the curve 6 to 18 months out. I know my PM will mess around with day trading the deferred curve on flow and market data if there is nothing else to do and he is in the mood.... but pretty rare.
Thanks - fundies assuming refers to fundamentals?
Hedge funds ( as in not merchant shops) I believe
fundies = fundamentals yes
Go to Amazon, search Trading Natural Gas and there's several books on the basics.
I'd love for an accurate weather forecast a couple weeks out, in reality, very few resources are accurate more than a week out though accuracy can be mean different things to different people.
Otherwise, yes its an analysis of the fundamental data and knowledge/view of the regulatory landscape. If you are talking about trading long-term basis To HH, add in views of the economy, load forecasts, renewable growth, thermal generation changes, etc. Most people trading basis out the curve are probably involved in the physical market to some degree, though there are certainly spec players involved.
For NA. Natural gas trades on a seasonal basis due to underground storage. JV months are summer, following XH winter months. We inject gas in the summer, we withdraw gas in the winter.
Our main government data comes from EIA and is reported in arrears of 2 months. Monthly data comes out on a state level. We also get a weekly storage # estimate in change of storage legels on a regional basis. Any major sellside research will take the EIA format and build a pro-forma b/s to forecast the “end of season” future #s. JPM/GS probably send out the most frequent b/s updates so would reach out and get those to get an idea of how eos works. But yes a very common RV style trade would h/j vs f/h ratio trade, ie do I think Jan is more/less bullish than following summer or so.
As others have already said, you still use fundamental gas models to forecast storage levels further out the curve given your assumptions on Production/CADimports/Industrial/Rescom/Power/LNG/MexExports/Pipe Fuel/Pipeloss. Given your assumptions where does that leave us EOS and historically what does that look like price wise etc. There's a large amount of LNG demand coming online shortly coupled with some pretty outrageous load growth scenarios when it comes to data centers/AI/EVs in the not so distant future. Couple that with coal retirements and if we actually get some weather ever again things can get spicy. There is often a lot of producer hedge flow in the backs but given the impending fundamental demand pictures a good bit of spec as well. You just need a decent balance sheet to hold a lot of risk that far out and eat the cost of doing so.
It’s all fundamental and it’s (mostly) all about storage. I say this as some markets don’t have any storage.
You start with a balance sheet and have storage projections every month. You forecast that the supply demand balance (SD) is too tight and we will not inject much gas over the summer vs historical norms. Summer/winter spread will compress. A proxy could be the Oct/Nov spread or the Oct/March spread will tighten aka start to trade close to parity. But this might also create a issue where the probability of running out of gas over the winter is higher so spreads like Feb/March or March/April will need to hold more risk premium.
The opposite is we are projecting a giant surplus of gas over the summer which could overwhelm storage and potentially create a very small winter draw. Apr/Oct might need to widen, Oct/Jan way widen and guys might be willing to sell winter risk premium based on this view aka sell Feb/mar, mar/ April.
You balance might say summer is well supplied but for some particular reason July needs to have a large storage withdraw, well then you might trade July to reach some kind of parity to a winter month to incentive storage operators not to inject gas and make this supply available to the market.
Gas trading is all relative value, but the value comes from a price signal needed to change economic behaviour whether that’s moving a storage operators injection / withdraw profile or turning on/off a pipeline
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