NatGas market... the "widow maker"

[Frederick Foresight]

Anyone interested in trading natural gas might be interested in reading:


It's an interesting story centered around two traders, John Arnold and Brian Hunter, and the collapse of Amaranth.

 

[heispark]

As far as I know, the biggest loss in hedge fund history was made by Amaranth Advisor which traded Widow Maker spread (March-April spread). I think the nick name 'Widow Maker' came from it. Except Widow Maker spread, Nat Gas spread market is relatively stable since Shale Oil revolution. Outright trading is also very attractive due to high volatility and clean price action. Look at 1 or 5 min chart and you may find candles are relatively quite 'neat' compared to stock indices or forex. Actually I have been trading /NG exclusively since 3 years ago.

 

[Sergio123]

I truly do not believe that will ever happen again. I think April 20, 2020 was a planned and coordinated effort to enrich the pockets of a certain few entities, which the CME was complicit in making happen. Yes, I know there are no more breakers in place to prevent it from happening again, but something was too tidy and neat about how that went down.

It "smelled" of skulduggery and caught everyone unawares, and they simply puilled a CYA in the 3-4 weeks leading up to it.

Whether or not that is true, there was definitely a capacity storage problem. Just prior to that OPEC was attempting to flood the market with cheap supply and take out other producers.

 

[engineering]

It seems that if you have neither productive capacity nor storage capacity you would be at a major disadvantage here.

 

[Sergio123]

It seems that if you have neither productive capacity nor storage capacity you would be at a major disadvantage here.

Consumption problem. The world went into lockdown.