Products

Definition

Natural Gas, Futures and Day-Ahead contracts registered in the Clearing House are market transactions and OTC transactions.

Both are agreements between two parties to buy or sell a specific amount of gas on a future date at a fixed price.

The Clearing House provides a mechanism ensuring the successful outcome of the trades to both counterparties. It uses specified standard contract features to facilitate trading.

How are they used?

There are three different types of trading strategies:

• Hedging: these contracts are a tool for managing price risk. Buyers and sellers can hedge spot market positions against adverse price movements, mitigating or eliminating market risk. Hedging entails taking a forward position that offsets an existing position and may be total or partial.
• Speculation: here the idea is to take on market risk in order to generate a profit by correctly betting on future price trends.
• Arbitrage: this strategy entails simultaneous trading in various instruments in order to leverage temporary price distorsion. 

The existence of market participants with differing trading interests in respect of these contracts bolsters market liquidity and efficiency.

Features

The Underlying Asset on Gas Contracts is the title over Natural Gas, which may be acquired or disposed by means of a Title Transfer, in accordance with the gas system regulations.

The delivery day begins at 06:00 am (CET) of the day on which the Gas Title Transfers must be carried out, in accordance with the gas system Regulations, and which ends at 06:00 am on the following day.

The Delivery Area or Point for Natural Gas Contracts is the virtual interchange point on a Natural Gas transmission system where title transfer of Natural Gas is carried out.

The register unit is 1MWh/day (tick).

The nominal/multiplier of the contract is determined in MWh/d, using the following formula:

                MWh/day * No of days in the contract

The price of the contract is in Euros per MWh/d, with 2 decimal places.