Handbook of Multi-Commodity Markets and Products: Structuring, Trading and Risk Management

Handbook of Multi-Commodity Markets and ProductsOver recent decades, the marketplace has seen an increasing integration, not only among different types of commodity markets such as energy, agricultural, and metals, but also with financial markets. This trend raises important questions about how to identify and analyse opportunities in and manage risks of commodity products.

The Handbook of Multi-Commodity Markets and Products offers traders, commodity brokers, and other professionals a practical and comprehensive manual that covers market structure and functioning, as well as the practice of trading across a wide range of commodity markets and products. Written in non-technical language, this important resource includes the information needed to begin to master the complexities of and to operate successfully in today’s challenging and fluctuating commodity marketplace.

Designed as a practical practitioner-orientated resource, the book includes a detailed overview of key markets – oil, coal, electricity, emissions, weather, industrial metals, freight, agricultural and foreign exchange – and contains a set of tools for analysing, pricing and managing risk for the individual markets. Market features and the main functioning rules of the markets in question are presented, along with the structure of basic financial products and standardised deals. A range of vital topics such as stochastic and econometric modelling, market structure analysis, contract engineering, as well as risk assessment and management are presented and discussed in detail with illustrative examples to commodity markets.

The authors showcase how to structure and manage both simple and more complex multi-commodity deals. Addressing the issues of profit-making and risk management, the book reveals how to exploit pay-off profiles and trading strategies on a diversified set of commodity prices. In addition, the book explores how to price energy products and other commodities belonging to markets segmented across specific structural features.

The Handbook of Multi-Commodity Markets and Products includes a wealth of proven methods and useful models that can be selected and developed in order to make appropriate estimations of the future evolution of prices and appropriate valuations of products. The authors additionally explore market risk issues and what measures of risk should be adopted for the purpose of accurately assessing exposure from multi-commodity portfolios.

This vital resource offers the models, tools, strategies and general information commodity brokers and other professionals need to succeed in today’s highly competitive marketplace.

ANDREA RONCORONI is Professor of Finance at ESSEC Business School (Paris-Singapore), regular Visiting Professor at Bocconi University (Milan), and Director of the ESSEC Energy and Commodity Finance research center. He holds PhD’s in Applied Mathematics and in Finance. His research interests primarily cover energy and commodity markets, corporate financial risk analysis and management, quantitative modelling, derivative design and valuation. Andrea put forward the Threshold Model for price simulation in spiky electricity markets, and devised FloRisk Metrics, an effective analytics to monitor and manage corporate financial exposure. He publishes in academic journals, professional reviews, financial book series, and acts as Associate Editor for the Journal of Energy Markets and Co-Editor for Argo Review. Andrea has co-authored the reference volume Implementing Models in Quantitative Finance. As a professional advisor, he consulted for private companies and public institutions, including Dong Energy, Edison, Enel, GDF, Natixis, and Trafigura Electricity Italia (TEI Energy). He is founder and CEO of Energisk, a start-up company developing cutting-edge risk analytics for corporate clients.

GIANLUCA FUSAI is Full Professor in Financial Mathematics at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy, and a PT Reader in Mathematical Finance at Cass Business School, City University of London, UK. He holds a PhD in Finance from Warwick Business School, an MSc in Statistics and Operational Research from the University of Essex and a BSc in Economics from Bocconi University. His research interests focus on Energy Markets, Financial Engineering, Numerical Methods for Finance, Quantitative Risk Management. He has published extensively on these topics in top-tier international reviews. Gianluca has also co-authored the best-selling textbook Implementing Models in Quantitative Finance. Gianluca has cooperated to several projects in energy markets including a multi-energy risk assessment tool developed in conjunction with a pool of energy and industrial companies and a forward curve builder for the power and gas markets nowadays used for trading and marking to market. He has also been a consultant for private and public sector on building pricing tools of derivative products. Gianluca has been an expert witness in several derivative disputes.

MARK CUMMINS is Senior Lecturer in Finance at the Dublin City University Business School and holds a PhD in Quantitative Finance. Mark’s research interests include a broad range of energy and commodity modelling, derivatives, risk management and trading topics. Mark has published in international journals such as Energy Economics, Applied Energy and the Journal of Energy Markets, as well as mainstream finance journals such as the Journal of Financial Markets, International Review of Financial Analysis and Quantitative Finance. Mark has previous industry experience working as a Quantitative Analyst within the Global Risk function for BP Oil International Ltd. As part of the Risk Quantitative Analysis team, primary responsibilities included derivatives and price curve model validation and development, with a global remit across BP’s energy and commodity activities. Mark is engaged in ongoing industry training and consultancy activities, focused on the energy sector primarily.