Power Trading Desk Master Program

1. Why the Physical System Drives Price - how grid operations, not financial theory, set power prices
2. The Generation Stack - gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar: cost, flexibility, dispatch behavior
3. Thermal Generation Economics - heat rates, fuel costs, variable cost of dispatch
4. Nuclear & Baseload - must-run economics and their effect on off-peak pricing
5. Hydro & Storage Hydro - water value, reservoir management, opportunity cost
6. Wind & Solar - zero-marginal-cost generation and its market impact
7. Merit-Order Dispatch - how the supply stack clears against demand to set price
8. Unit Commitment - day-ahead scheduling of generators under constraints
9. Economic Dispatch - real-time least-cost matching of generation to load
10. Security-Constrained Economic Dispatch (SCED) - dispatch under transmission security constraints
11. Security-Constrained Unit Commitment (SCUC) - commitment under security and reliability constraints
12. Transmission Topology - the grid as a network: nodes, lines, and flows
13. AC vs DC Power Flow - power-flow models and what each captures
14. Transmission Constraints & Congestion - why congestion happens and how it shows up in price
15. Nodal vs Zonal Market Design - how market design choices shape pricing
16. Transmission Expansion Planning - how the grid grows and what it means for congestion
17. Grid Reliability Standards - reliability rules and their market consequences
18. Load Forecasting - predicting demand and the drivers behind it
19. Renewable Forecasting - wind and solar forecasting and its uncertainty
20. Intermittency & Balancing - keeping supply and demand matched in real time
21. Storage Economics - batteries and pumped hydro as flexibility providers
22. Demand Response - demand as a dispatchable resource

Project: Build a merit-order dispatch simulator. Construct a stack of generators and clear it against a demand curve to produce a market price.

23. What a Power Desk Actually Does - the daily cycle from pre-open to settlement
24. Desk Structure & Roles - trader, analyst, scheduler, risk, back office and their handoffs
25. The Trading Day, Hour by Hour - day-ahead and real-time timelines walked through
26. Books, Positions & the Blotter - recording, netting, and reading positions
27. Physical vs Financial Mindset - why the same MW means different things on each side
28. Information Flow on the Desk - where signals originate and how decisions propagate
29. The Limits That Govern a Desk - position, loss, and VaR limits as the operating envelope
30. P&L: What It Is and What It Hides - daily P&L, mark-to-market, and the gaps between them
31. Working With the Control Functions - risk, compliance, and middle office as partners
32. Communication Under Pressure - how desks talk during volatility, and how it fails
33. Tools of the Desk - screens, ETRM, spreadsheets, and the real toolchain
34. A Day That Goes Wrong - a case study from a normal day into a costly mistake

Project: Build a position blotter. Model a day's trades into a live position and P&L view across physical and financial books.

35. Why Power Is Not Like Other Commodities - non-storability and real-time balancing
36. The US Market Map - PJM, ERCOT, CAISO, MISO and how they differ
37. PJM in Practice - design, products, and the quirks traders exploit
38. ERCOT in Practice - energy-only design and scarcity pricing risk
39. CAISO & the Western Markets - renewables-heavy dynamics, duck curve, EIM
40. MISO & Seams - inter-regional flows and seams arbitrage
41. Locational Marginal Pricing - energy, congestion, and loss components
42. Day-Ahead vs Real-Time - how the two settlements interact
43. The EU Market Map - Nord Pool, EPEX SPOT, and coupling
44. Nord Pool in Practice - hydro pricing, area prices, system price
45. EPEX & Central Europe - continental day-ahead and intraday structure
46. Market Coupling - how zones clear together and what de-coupling means
47. Capacity Markets - capacity remuneration in the US and EU
48. Ancillary Services - reserves, frequency response, and energy interaction
49. Cross-Border & Interconnectors - flows and the congestion they create
50. Reading a New Market Fast - a framework for orienting in any power market

Project: Model nodal prices for a simple network. Compute LMPs across a small node-and-line network and decompose them into energy, congestion, and loss.

51. Why Textbook Trades Fail - theory versus a real order book
52. Spread Trading Fundamentals - spark, dark, and location spreads
53. The Spark Spread in Depth - gas-to-power economics in practice
54. Dark & Quark Spreads - coal and carbon-adjusted margins
55. Locational/Basis Trades - trading congestion between nodes and zones
56. Calendar & Time Spreads - shape across hours, days, and seasons
57. Building a Structured Trade - combining legs into a defined thesis
58. Optionality You Don't See - embedded options in assets and contracts
59. Tolling & Generation Optionality - valuing a plant as spark-spread options
60. Storage & Flexibility Trades - batteries, pumped hydro, demand response
61. Renewables Shape Risk - trading around wind/solar intermittency
62. Load-Following Trades - serving demand shape and its risk
63. FTRs & Congestion Hedging - financial transmission rights
64. Virtual/Convergence Bidding - INC/DEC trades and DA/RT convergence
65. Renewable PPAs - structure and risk of power purchase agreements
66. Corporate PPAs - trading and hedging behind corporate offtake deals
67. Renewable Certificate Markets - RECs, Guarantees of Origin, and how they trade
68. Virtual Power Plants - aggregating distributed resources into a tradable asset
69. Distributed Energy Resources - DER economics and market participation
70. Flexibility Markets - trading flexibility as a distinct product
71. Cross-Commodity Plays - gas, carbon, and power as a complex
72. Carbon Allowances & Market Interaction - how carbon prices feed power economics
73. Trading the Weather - how forecasts move price and shape positions
74. Winning & Losing Strategies - two worked examples, one right, one wrong

Project: Construct forward curves. Build a shaped forward curve from market quotes and use it to mark a simple book.

75. What a Valuation Is For - decision support, not truth
76. Forward Curves - building, interpolating, and trusting the curve
77. Curve Shaping - from monthly granularity to hourly shape
78. Volatility in Power - extreme, regime-dependent vol
79. Pricing Power Options - adapting standard models and where they break
80. Spread Option Valuation - spark-spread options and correlation risk
81. Monte Carlo for Power - simulating spikes, mean reversion, and jumps
82. Scenario Generation - producing coherent price scenarios for valuation and risk
83. Copulas & Dependence Modeling - modeling joint behavior across markets
84. Extreme Value Theory - modeling the tails that drive power risk
85. Probabilistic Forecasting - forecasting distributions, not point estimates
86. Bayesian Forecasting - updating forecasts as information arrives
87. Asset Valuation - plants, storage, and contracts as optionality
88. Greeks for Power Desks - delta, gamma, vega in a power context
89. Correlation: The Silent Killer - why correlation breaks at the worst time
90. Backtesting & Its Traps - survivorship, overfitting, false confidence
91. Model Risk & The Skeptic's Checklist - knowing when a model is lying to you
92. A Model That Blew Up - a case study in misplaced model confidence

Project: Price a spark-spread option. Value a spark-spread option under correlation assumptions and stress where the valuation breaks.

93. The Modern Data-Driven Desk - how analytics changed power trading
94. Data Engineering for Trading - pipelines, storage, and quality for desk data
95. Stream Processing - real-time data flows for trading
96. Lakehouse Architecture - unified storage for analytics and trading data
97. Data Mesh - decentralized data ownership at enterprise scale
98. Market Data Platforms - ingesting, cleaning, and serving market data
99. Reference & Time-Series Data - managing the data that feeds every model
100. Real-Time Pricing Engines - architecture of low-latency pricing
101. Weather Analytics - turning weather data into tradable signal
102. Satellite & Alternative Data - non-traditional data sources for edge
103. Machine Learning in Power - where ML helps and where it misleads
104. Forecasting With ML - load, price, and renewable forecasting models
105. Feature Engineering for Power - inputs that capture market structure
106. Reinforcement Learning for Bidding - RL approaches to automated bidding
107. Stochastic Optimization - optimizing decisions under uncertainty
108. Dynamic Programming - sequential decision-making for storage and dispatch
109. Portfolio Optimization - allocating risk and capital across a book
110. Algorithmic & Execution Algorithms - automated bid/offer and execution strategies
111. Model Deployment, Monitoring & Observability - running models safely in production
112. Market Surveillance & The Analytics Failure Case - detecting manipulation; when a pipeline broke a desk

Project: Develop a weather-driven forecasting model. Build a model that turns weather inputs into a load or price forecast and evaluate it honestly.

113. Risk as Survival, Not Compliance - framing risk around staying in the game
114. Market Risk - price exposure, sensitivities, and limits
115. Value at Risk - methods, assumptions, and failures
116. Beyond VaR - expected shortfall, stress, and tail thinking
117. Credit Risk - counterparty exposure, margining, CSAs
118. Liquidity Risk - funding and market liquidity compounding
119. Liquidity Stress Scenarios - designing realistic liquidity crunches
120. Congestion Risk - basis and transmission risk on physical positions
121. Volumetric Risk - volume uncertainty in load and renewables
122. Renewable Portfolio Risk - managing risk across a renewables-heavy book
123. Weather Risk - quantifying and hedging weather exposure
124. Fuel Supply Risk - gas and fuel availability as a position risk
125. Plant Outage Risk - generation outages and their P&L impact
126. Transmission Outage Risk - grid outages and congestion shocks
127. Regulatory Risk - exposure to rule and market-design changes
128. Operational Risk - process, system, and human-error exposure
129. Intraday Risk Management - managing risk inside the operating day
130. Stress Testing & Scenario Analysis - scenarios that inform decisions
131. Enterprise Risk Management Integration - tying desk risk into firm-wide ERM
132. Three Lines of Defense - the control model and how the lines interact
133. Model Governance, Validation & Inventory - independent review, model inventory, and control
134. Governance Committees & Internal Audit - risk committees, audit interactions, oversight
135. Limits, Margin & Collateral - limits that work and the cash mechanics behind them
136. The Blow-Up Anatomy - dissecting a real risk failure end to end

Project: Build an intraday risk dashboard. Produce a dashboard that tracks position, sensitivity, and limit usage through the operating day.

137. From Trade to Delivery - the operational chain after the trade
138. Scheduling Basics - submitting schedules and what the ISO does with them
139. Nominations - gas and power nominations and deadlines
140. Real-Time Operations - managing the position as the hour approaches
141. Imbalance & Deviation - when actual diverges from schedule
142. Outages & Curtailments - forced and planned interruptions
143. Tagging & Transmission - E-Tags, OASIS, reservation mechanics
144. Confirmations & Matching - catching breaks before disputes
145. Operational Deadlines - the clock-driven nature of operations
146. Settlement Mechanics - how money moves and when
147. Operational Failure Modes - recurring ways operations go wrong
148. An Operational Near-Miss - a process failure caught (or not) in time

Project: Implement trade lifecycle workflows. Model a trade through its full lifecycle from capture to settlement with the right controls at each state.

149. What an ETRM Is For - control, visibility, and trust beyond record-keeping
150. The ETRM Data Model - trades, deals, instruments, and connections
151. Trade Capture - capturing intent accurately and the cost of errors
152. Trade Lifecycle State Model - modeling a trade's full lifecycle states
153. Validation & Workflow - approval chains and segregation of duties
154. The Position Engine - architecture of position aggregation at scale
155. Curve Management - managing forward curves inside the platform
156. Reference Data Governance - owning and controlling reference data
157. Market Data Validation - catching bad market data before it prices a book
158. Valuation in the ETRM - where pricing lives and how curves feed in
159. Credit Exposure Calculations - computing counterparty exposure in-system
160. Risk in the ETRM - limits, sensitivities, and reporting
161. P&L Explain - attributing P&L change to its drivers
162. Scheduling & Operations in ETRM - linking the physical chain to records
163. Settlement & Invoicing - closing the loop from trade to cash
164. Audit, Lineage & Controls - traceability and data lineage
165. APIs & Integration Architecture - connecting ETRM to the wider stack
166. Cloud-Native ETRM Platforms - modern architecture and its trade-offs

Project: Design an ETRM data model. Design the core entities and relationships for a multi-commodity ETRM and justify the choices.

167. The Regulatory Landscape - FERC, REMIT, and the rules shaping behavior
168. Market Manipulation - what it is and where lines blur
169. Surveillance & Compliance - how conduct is monitored
170. Reporting Obligations - transaction and position reporting
171. Conduct & Ethics - everyday decisions defining desk integrity
172. Behavioral Biases on the Desk - anchoring, loss aversion, overconfidence
173. Decision-Making Under Uncertainty - choosing with incomplete information
174. Pressure, Stress & Performance - human factors driving errors
175. Leading a Desk - building a team that trades well and survives
176. Hiring & Developing Traders - what separates durable traders from lucky ones
177. Incentives & Compensation - how pay shapes risk-taking
178. Crisis Leadership - running a desk through a crisis
179. A Conduct Failure Case - dissecting a real regulatory/behavioral failure

Project: Design a desk conduct & surveillance framework. Define the controls, monitoring, and escalation path for a desk's conduct risk.

180. The Enterprise Trading Stack - how systems fit together at scale
181. Build vs Buy - vendor ETRM versus in-house builds
182. Vendor ETRM Landscape - evaluating platforms against desk needs
183. Integration Patterns - event-driven, batch, and API integration
184. Event Sourcing - event-based state as a trading-system pattern
185. High-Availability Architectures - designing for continuous uptime
186. Stream Processing at Enterprise Scale - real-time data backbones
187. Lakehouse & Data Mesh in the Enterprise - enterprise data architecture choices
188. Real-Time Pricing & Risk Engines - low-latency valuation and risk at scale
189. Digital Twins - modeling assets and the desk in software
190. Market Data Architecture - sourcing, normalizing, and distributing data
191. Scheduling Platform Architecture - systems behind the physical chain
192. Reporting & BI Layer - turning trading data into decisions
193. Data Governance for Trading - ownership, quality, lineage at enterprise scale
194. Cloud Architecture for Trading - cloud-native design and its trade-offs
195. Observability & Monitoring - seeing inside the running platform
196. Security & Resilience - protecting and hardening the platform
197. Disaster Recovery & Continuity - keeping the desk running through failure
198. Implementation, Migration & TCO - de-risking projects and the real cost of ownership
199. The Technology Roadmap - sequencing platform evolution over time

Project: Design a cloud-based trading architecture. Produce an architecture for a resilient, cloud-native trading platform with data and risk layers.

200. What Makes a Desk Durable - traits that let desks survive cycles
201. Desk Strategy & Mandate - defining what the desk does and doesn't do
202. Capacity Expansion Planning - long-term asset and position planning
203. Battery Optimization - optimizing storage assets within a portfolio
204. Battery Degradation Modeling - accounting for degradation in storage economics
205. EV Charging Economics - trading and flexibility from EV charging loads
206. Microgrids - economics and market role of microgrids
207. Grid-Forming Inverters - how inverter-based resources change the system
208. Hydrogen & Power-to-X - emerging flexibility and offtake plays
209. Energy Transition Strategy - positioning a desk for a decarbonizing system
210. Building the Tech Stack - ETRM, analytics, and data as one system
211. Building the Risk Framework - limits, reporting, and culture as one structure
212. Building the Team - roles, skills, and succession
213. Process & Controls - operations that scale without breaking
214. Capital, Funding & Treasury - funding positions and managing collateral
215. Adapting to Market Change - staying durable as markets and rules shift
216. The Operating Model & Enterprise Playbook - running the desk as a repeatable system
217. Governance & Oversight - board, risk committee, and control oversight

Project: Produce a board-ready operating model. Document the operating model for a durable desk and present the case to leadership.

218. The Capstone Brief - designing a complete enterprise trading organization
219. Defining the Mandate - markets, products, and risk appetite
220. Front Office Design - desk structure, roles, and trading strategy
221. Middle Office Design - risk, control, and validation functions
222. Back Office Design - settlement, confirmations, and operations
223. The Risk Framework - end-to-end risk structure and limits
224. ETRM Architecture - selecting and designing the core platform
225. Market Data Platform - the data foundation for the organization
226. Scheduling Platform - the operational/physical systems layer
227. Reporting & Analytics - decision-support across the organization
228. Data Governance - ownership, quality, and lineage at org scale
229. Cloud & Technology Architecture - the full technology blueprint
230. The Operating Model - how front/middle/back and tech run together
231. The Technology Roadmap - phasing the build over time
232. Financials & Business Case - funding, cost, and the case to leadership
233. Presenting the Design - communicating the blueprint to stakeholders
234. Capstone Synthesis - bringing the full program into one coherent design

Project: A complete trading-organization blueprint, integrating front/middle/back office, risk, ETRM, market data, scheduling, governance, cloud architecture, operating model, technology roadmap, and business case.