Are failure indexes fair play?

Regulators must clarify stance on trading off big-data forecasts of outages, writes energy consultant

Regulators need to pinpoint the threshold above which a Fifi’s accuracy becomes insider information

It’s not uncommon to see an algo trade milliseconds before an outage declaration, which is likely to agitate other market participants. The trade may well be based on Forecast of Impending Failure Indices (Fifi): a highly accurate forecast of the probability of an asset’s imminent failure and a product of the big-data revolution. But European regulators have not dealt with forecasts within their definitions of what constitutes insider trading and, if they don’t, the agitated may remain aggrieved