Dazz51 

Thank you all for your help and steer in the right direction. With regards to fat tails and the links you have provided this all looks very promising. The image for the TradingView Chart looks like the exact market I am looking at getting the historical data from. The only problem I have is that as I am not a trader I cannot easily read these charts. If I find the right place for the historical data and get taught how to extract the data I need in layman's terms then I could go through and retrieve it all and produce my business plan and cash flow forecasts from that data. If I give one example of what I need, then perhaps one of you helpful people can help me further. I hope. So for instance I would like to know an average price for Physical Natural Gas to be delivered into the UK system, for say July 2012 if purchased during the month prior (June 2012) I would be buying a whole month of days at a time. This way I can work out and plot the average prices for hedging one month in advance, I would then follow this example and plot up until July 2013. I would then hope to plot the same for 2/3 month hedges and then plot buying quarter blocks of 3 months and annual blocks of days. This all seems rather complicated with no trading background and am hopeful that someone takes pity on me. Thank you in advance Darren

I misread your question. You are talking about Natural Gas, not Gasoline. There are most likely fewer RBOB traders than there are NG traders. I know a couple, for example, but have not talked to anyone who traded RBOB.

So, if you search for "NG" you may find someone.

But as far as plotting front month futures against delivery date, that will not provide a constant, so you want to compare the average spread over history?

That is the US "NG" contract plotted at the monthly close, but that would probably need to be adjusted to delivery date -30 day, not month end... And then exported into excel. Then gather the same data for delivery date/spot, then write a formula to compare and average the spread?

Dazz51 

Thank you all for your help and steer in the right direction. With regards to fat tails and the links you have provided this all looks very promising. The image for the TradingView Chart looks like the exact market I am looking at getting the historical data from. The only problem I have is that as I am not a trader I cannot easily read these charts. If I find the right place for the historical data and get taught how to extract the data I need in layman's terms then I could go through and retrieve it all and produce my business plan and cash flow forecasts from that data. If I give one example of what I need, then perhaps one of you helpful people can help me further. I hope. So for instance I would like to know an average price for Physical Natural Gas to be delivered into the UK system, for say July 2012 if purchased during the month prior (June 2012) I would be buying a whole month of days at a time. This way I can work out and plot the average prices for hedging one month in advance, I would then follow this example and plot up until July 2013. I would then hope to plot the same for 2/3 month hedges and then plot buying quarter blocks of 3 months and annual blocks of days. This all seems rather complicated with no trading background and am hopeful that someone takes pity on me. Thank you in advance Darren

I think you are thinking about contango and backwardation. Term structure can change, and is not always the same. This might give you a start. How to leverage market contango and backwardation

There is daily open/high/low/close data for NG back to 2007

Have a look at Platts Energy in general and look out for their gas forums - good place to network and meet the physical players!

Dazz51 

By way of introducing myself, I have no trading experience but am currently working on a business plan and cash flow forecasts to setup a commercial gas supply company here in the United Kingdom. The market is a very closed run thing and I am struggling to get the information required. The main part of the plan requires knowledge of trading physical gas. This is such a complex industry with huge profit but not without its risk. I am appealing for anyone with the knowledge of how this market works in terms of trading gas futures and how to get statistics on historical data for trading futures. Currently I am trying to compare like for like gas spot prices with gas futures prices for the previous year to date, working on the basis that I would be hedging a month at a time. So for example I would like to get the average futures price for August 2012 if buying during the previous month of July 2012 and the same for each month thereafter. Ideally I would also like to do this with longer hedges of 2/3 months to compare. I already have the daily spot price information but I seem to have no way of getting the futures information and wondered if anyone could help. I am aware that the trading is done through ICE and APXENDEX here in the UK. Even if you can't help with my particular current predicament, I am most certainly in need of any help that is on offer as I have to create a sound business plan very soon as I have some large companies interested. I hope to hear for anyone you thinks they can help. Kind Regards Darren

Hi Dazz51, maybe ia can help you. I' m used a natural gas platform NINJA trader 7. I used ranged bars as well as CCI with parameters 50 and 100. The principle of operation was the fact that when you open Runge bar and a signal is above 50 I tried to go. The mark 100 was used as the definition of a trend because it starts to come out so you can close.

Try it again if I could open that template

If you are going to trade it physically have a lot of care when doing projections based just on the curves, as prices, they can change wildly at some points, maybe you should focus in volatility and your expected rate of sales so you can estimate methods for transfer price changes to your clients, and also this way you can get an idea of what kind of hedges will make sense to your projected business. Futures quotes will be near your actual market quotes as there are companies that keep an eye on both.

As you are a commercial energy trader, your best charting option would be delayed esignal data package for $49 per month which provides a 15 minutes delayed data for all global exchanges including CME, ICE and euronext where major energy products are traded.

Here is a Natural gas continous futures contract chart with symbol of NG #F, you can get overall open interest and volume using NG #OI and NG #V symbols in esignal.

Also check out CME and ICE educational section where the exchanges provide the crack products and other energy products like GasOil, brent crude, WTI crude and their spreads.

Spreads on these products are typically used to rollover your positions to next month.