Large energy consumers buy futures contracts to reduce total spend and lower their exposure to market risk. But how should buyers decide which contract to buy and when and how much?
Quantego‘s dynamic hedging model now offers a model-driven solution for optimal risk management of energy procurement. Reduce market price exposure and buy the right power and gas futures contracts at the right time and in the right quantities with our optimization solution for energy buyers.
What's inside the software?
KEY FEATURES
- Optimal mix of futures and spot trading
- Optimal timing of orders for yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly futures
- Joint stochastic process of spot and futures prices
- Value-at-risk optimization
- Highly customizable model and interactive dashboard
- Rapidly deployed and securely hosted on AWS VPC
- Automate repeated optimization tasks
- Fully integrated in the QUASAR® Cloud platform
A detailed model of the futures buying process
Quantego’s dynamic hedging model consists of a price model and a decision model.
- The price model captures (a) the commodity term structure, (b) the dynamic evolution of the price forward curve, and (c) spot price mean reversion and price spikes.
- The decision model (a) anticipates future portfolio rebalancing when new contracts will become tradable, (b) accounts for varying liquidity of contracts over time, and (c) respects institutional order limits and hedge targets.
A ready-to-use graphical user interface
The model is available as ready-to-use yet highly customizable software solution deployed through QUASAR® Cloud.
Users can import and manage input data, execute optimization runs, inspect and analyze buying strategies, create interactive charts and reports, as well as export result data and easily share it across the organization. QUASAR® Cloud can be obtained as subscription service or set up on-premise via AWS VPC.
The world's most powerful stochastic programming solver
The model is driven by the powerful QUASAR® stochastic programming solver that combines the latest advancements in machine learning and mathematical optimization. QUASAR®’s highly efficient algorithms can solve the most complex stochastic-dynamic programming problems with hundreds of time stages, thousands of variables and millions of possible outcomes at an unprecedented speed.
Success Story
Extensive backtests based on several years of historical data of EEX and TTF futures indicate a substantial monetary value of using QUASAR® for hedging power and gas trades of a large industrial operation. QUASAR®’s dynamic hedging strategy not only achieves higher returns but also a lower drawdown than a 1/N benchmark trading strategy over the same time horizon.
What are the benefits?
Cost and risk reduction
- Optimal timing of futures and spot trading
- Reduce transaction cost by trading when products are most liquid
- Diversify risk by spreading buying volumes across products and time
Risk management and compliance
- Follow best practices in portfolio optimization
- Detailed disclosure of hedging decisions
- Avoid error-prone and opaque spreadsheet calculations
Automated monitoring and reporting
- Buying recommendations and opportunity outlook
- Monitoring of company’s future exposure
- Value-at-risk and cashflow-at-risk for different hedging strategies
Hosted on QUASAR® Cloud
- Unify multiple models and its data on one platform
- Customizable model and reports
- Automate repeated optimization tasks
- Share model output as interactive reports across the organization
What our clients say
BASF trades excess power supply on energy markets at different production sites across Europe. QUASAR provides our buyers with daily hedging targets and an outlook on the right mix between futures, forward products, and spot.
Advanced Analytics in Global Procurement at BASF SE, Germany
More Information and Resources
Check out our blog with more resources, such as white papers, customer success stories and academic publications.