AspectPM Price Manager

The Challenge

Any company with positions in commodity markets needs to revalue existing positions on a daily basis for marked-to-market (MTM) accounting. And traders also want to see how curves are moving to measure the effectiveness of their forecasts. Trading companies rely on hundreds of forward curves that can come from multiple sources. Consolidating and analyzing volumes of historical and forward data to make confident trading decisions is difficult without a centralized system and process. Many companies use Excel spreadsheets to produce and manage forward curves. This practice does not allow for storing volumes of curves to chart against seasonal and historical trends and for comparing the effectiveness of historical forecasting versus actual prices. Also, as new regulations and tougher auditing standards come into play, a system is even more necessary.

Solution Overview:
AspectPM For Oil Markets

Aspect Price Manager (PM) is a forward curve management solution that supports the global price forecasting process. It aggregates forward curves and forecasts from all sources into a single database. It incorporates a knowledge-base of pricing methodologies and supports the end-to-end price forecasting process from traders entering differentials through to the delivery of prices exported to other systems.

AspectPM provides a framework for calculating, consolidating, archiving and re-distributing forward prices. With AspectPM, traders can create and consolidate forward curves to feed into AspectCTRM, or other trade and risk management systems, for MTM calculations and risk analysis. It also manipulates and consolidates data to provide other derived curves for use internally, and to stress test trading positions.

AspectPM provides a user friendly interface to enter forecasts across different time periods such as weeks, months or quarters. Users update price forecasts on a regular basis through uploads or manual entry. Each price curve can be seen in various reports with the grouping criteria based on price curve attributes, such as geographical region, material and price provider. AspectPM is Web-based like all Aspect systems, which means there’s no software to install or maintain. You simply log-on via a secure password.