Markets and energy

This section is about the distance between a price on a screen and the contract that price belongs to. A quoted number is the output of a rule — which contract month, which settlement window, which exchange, which counterparty obligation — and the rule is published. Materials here take the published rule and work forward from it: what a futures-based fund actually owns when it reports a return, why a power price can print below zero in the middle of the day, how a settlement is struck and who is required to file the figure afterwards.

The materials here start from a document rather than from a chart: the storage spread a trader reads off the forward curve, the roll schedule a futures-based fund discloses in its own filings, the day-ahead auction that lets a power price settle below zero. Each one names the report it works from and the period that report covers, so a reader can open the same page the material was written from. Where the earlier column wrote on these subjects, its pieces stay at their own addresses under the headings their author gave them.