Fundamental Data in Energy Markets

Lauren Seliga, Hillary Stevenson and Cory Madden

Market participants across major energy markets seek to understand underlying supply and demand of a given commodity in a given location in order to better understand market forces that influence price. There is a multitude of fundamental data – information on supply, demand, storage and transportation – available from public sources such as the Energy Information Administration (EIA), disclosure and public statements from market participants and, since 2000, private data vendors such as Genscape have transformed data quality and market transparency by literally measuring the underlying fundamentals with an array of high-tech monitors and breakthrough new technologies.

In recent years, market participants have become savvier in the use of fundamental data, using increasingly higher volumes of fundamental data for pre-trade analytics, risk management and asset optimisation, and ingesting data in real time. There is a strong correlation between the availability of real-time fundamental data and market liquidity. Transparency of market conditions, specifically fundamentals, provides market participants with the confidence to trade and decreases the information value of asset