Optimize Energy Trading and Risk Processes with Progress Apama

Today, energy prices are exhibiting unprecedented volatilities, leading energy merchants and oil majors to seek cutting-edge techniques and tools to protect themselves from the resulting exposures. Just as Progress® Apama® was among the very first to successfully apply complex event processing (CEP) to traded capital markets, it is addressing the traded energy markets as they reach maturity in terms of product coverage and liquidity.

Applications for Energy
Progress Apama is working with leading market participants to identify, model and deliver applications designed specifically for asset-backed energy trading and risk management. Here are some ways that Apama's flexible CEP engine can be applied within energy markets:

Arbitrage trading: Energy merchants have an intrinsic understanding of the physical markets in which they operate. This provides a unique insight to market characteristics which can be utilized for discretionary trading for calendar, location, spark and dark spreads. Apama is a powerful arbitrage trading engine that can be used to exploit arbitrage opportunities, even for hybrid spreads using OTC and exchange-traded instruments.

Auto hedging: Physical gas and power markets are underpinned by long-term structured trade agreements. While these offer some assurance on delivery prices, energy merchants typically have other exposure parameters. These include: crude oil price, FX rates, counter party credit, interest rates and transmission constraints as well as supply demand volume uncertainty. Apama provides the ideal platform for "what if?" analysis of the potential risks and can programmatically mitigate the resultant exposures through real-time hedge trading instructions.

Risk Framework: In response to client demand, Apama has developed a real-time risk framework designed to accommodate the broad range of risk use cases needed by risk managers. These cases include Risk Aggregation, Concentration Heat Maps, RAROC and a Risk Firewall for real-time limit breach detection, alerting and prevention. Apama provides an extensible, rule-based framework with configurable dashboards ideal for risk monitoring and reporting.

Asset optimization: From production despatch and monitoring to distribution and balance trading, Apama can help asset-backed companies optimize energy portfolios. Apama has worked on various parts of the value chain: from upstream production & refining; supply grid / network monitoring; and through to downstream shipping and distribution.