As we’ve noted many times on this site in multiple blog posts and reports, data is both the lifeblood and a scourge for energy trading companies. With new sources of data (new markets, new trading locations and points, new systems, new assets, etc.) constantly increasing in number and tenor, the ability to capture, validate, visualize and analyze data has become even more challenging, but also more necessary than ever as trading margins tighten and profits become even less predictable. Data and new sources of data have become even more important as COVID-19 lockdowns have shift and/or destroyed demand meaning that historical trends may no longer apply.
Fortunately, there are new tools and capabilities being brought to market to help not only managing this flood of data, but also to analyze and find additional value in it. Enverus’ CurveBuilder is one of those tools and we recently had the chance to catch up with Wendi Orlando, VP of Product Management, Trading and Risk at Enverus to get a demo of the company’s latest iteration of Enverus’ web-based forward curve building and analytics solution, CurveBuilder.
Enverus’ offerings for the trading and risk space are buttressed by their MarketView data offering and CurveBuilder, a product that was originally developed by DataGenic, which was acquired by Enverus in 2017 when they were known as Drillinginfo. With continuing investment in both product lines, Enverus has created a broad and rich platform for data aggregation, data management, and forward curve development.
As Ms. Orlando noted, “MarketView offers the largest amount of energy data available anywhere, including market prices, production and pipeline volumetric data, and proprietary Enverus expert forecasts.” But she also noted that simply having access to a world of data can have limited value without the tools and capabilities to identify emerging opportunities or to measure your business’ performance, both current and future. Enverus’ suite of trading and risk solutions has been developed to address those needs, with data support tools, calendar management capabilities, user administration and CurveBuilder – a solution for combining multiple streams of historical, intraday and/or forward-looking market data to better identify correlations and predict the value of trades and market positions.
While CurveBuilder has always been a powerful solution for development of forward curves, it wasn’t necessarily user-friendly for non-technical analysts as the interface did require some level of experience in coding in order to take full advantage of the system’s curve building capabilities. However, with this latest release, which focused heavily on usability enhancements, traders and analysts are now able to utilize new advanced capabilities that enable even novice users to create new curves from scratch. Using CurveBuilder’s front-end tools, these users can quickly drill down and select the relevant data sets and create the new curve using any number of mathematical and logical operators. Once created, the new curve can be saved and be made available to other users across the organization. Additionally, with this new release, users can collaborate in developing new curves; and as each is developed and saved within the system, any changes to those curves are tracked and are auditable, ensuring internal and external compliance, which is particularly important when the curves are used for valuations.
Based on the demo, we walked away impressed by Enverus’ latest release of CurveBuilder. The new product not only provides improved usability for users of all skill levels, but its ability also to distribute bespoke and auditable curves across the organization via the web is particularly valuable given today’s distributed working environments.
By the way, if any readers wish to see a demo of the latest version of CurveBuilder, you can sign up for Enverus’ upcoming demo + virtual luncheon on Wednesday, Nov. 11 (held in conjunction with the Alpha Insight Energy Trading Risk Summit) here https://www.enverus.com/webinar/sign-up-see-curvebuilder-get-lunch-delivered-enverus-trading-risk-webinar-registration/
