Energy markets have moved.
Power, gas, and carbon are now dominated by exchange-traded forwards and futures. OTC still exists, but it’s no longer where the main price signal forms.
For traders, asset managers, risk teams, and CTOs, this has brought transparency, liquidity, and the safety of clearing.
It’s also created a new set of daily pains.
Here’s what they sound like from the desk itself:
1. “I can see the liquidity. I just can’t hit it without moving the market.”
Headline volumes look fantastic:
But “liquidity” on paper isn’t always executable liquidity. In volatile moments, the clip size you can lift without getting slipped is often a fraction of what the order book shows. And in benchmark hubs, everyone is trying to hit the same pockets at the same time.
The edge shifts to execution quality - algos that slice, time, and route intelligently. Without them, you’re giving away the spread before you’ve even got the position.
2. “My margin calls are killing my cash flow.”
Clearing removed counterparty credit risk. But it also made collateral management a daily reality.
Variation margin in a quiet week is fine. In a choppy one, it can shred cash buffers before lunch.
We all saw it in 2022: desks that couldn’t fund calls in time were forced to unwind good positions just to meet liquidity demands.
You need real-time margin visibility, tight integration with treasury, and contingency lines. Margin has become a live position you manage alongside your market risk.
3. “Everyone’s trading the same contracts. Where’s my edge?”
Exchange standardisation means fixed delivery terms, standard shapes, and no bespoke credit tweaks. Great for liquidity, but it strips out the flexibility that once made OTC a playground for creative structuring.
If everyone has access to the same instrument, the fight moves to how you trade it - speed, cross-market thinking, and execution discipline.
Edges now come from cross-commodity plays, time-structure trades, or combining fundamentals with automation. Product design isn’t where you win anymore.
4. “Manual clicks can’t compete with machines.”
Trading is increasingly automated even in the long-term forward markets. While intraday power trading is about 83% automated via APIs, longer-dated contracts are quickly catching up.
Opportunities that arise in forward & future markets can disappear in seconds. If you’re trading quarterly or yearly contracts with only manual clicks, you might still be playing a slower game in an increasingly faster market.
The baseline now is to have multi-venue, low-latency connectivity and algorithmic execution tools even for long-term trades - not to replace the trader, but to give you the speed and precision to compete.
5. “We’re drowning in data and starving for insight.”
With everything cleared and exchange-traded, price and volume data is abundant.
That doesn’t mean it’s usable.
You and your competitors see the same order book shifts, the same trades printing. Without linking that flood of data to fundamentals, you’re just reacting to what everyone else sees.
That means tying market data to context - from immediate factors like weather swings or an interconnector outage, to longer-term drivers like upcoming policy changes, FX-rates, new generation capacity, or evolving demand trends.
The real signal comes from context, not from staring at another depth chart.
6. “I’m buried in alerts I don’t need.”
Every venue, every product, every risk threshold - pushing notifications all day. Most of it’s noise. The important stuff? Lost in the scroll.
Alerting has to be selective and contextual. “Something happened” is useless unless the system tells you why it matters for your book, right now.
7. “I still don’t have one view of my whole risk.”
Clearing makes positions transparent, but across power, gas, carbon, and hedging instruments, many desks still have fragmented risk views. By the time data is consolidated from multiple systems, the exposure picture has already moved.
A single, real-time risk dashboard - pulling from clearing feeds, ETRMs, and in-house models - is essential to avoid doubling exposures or missing natural offsets.
Markets have gotten faster, more centralised and transparent. Liquidity is clustering in a few hubs (TTF, German power, EUAs), products are standardised and effectively cleared, and digital/API trading is the default. That’s great for integrity - but it compresses spreads, rewards speed over secrecy, and forces capital discipline.
The toolset to tackle these pains is well-known - but not always well-integrated:
We are embedded in this space - building environments where traders, quants, and risk teams operate off the same live picture. The gain is control, and the ability to act without friction.
In a market where everyone feels these pains, the winners are the desks that solve them better:
The exchange era is here. Power, gas, and carbon markets are transparent, liquid, and standardised. That’s good news for stability, but it turns up the pressure on execution, risk, and process.
If your desk hears itself in any of these “I…” statements, the question becomes: what are you doing about it?
Because in this market, pain points don’t go away on their own - they get solved by the desks that stay ahead.