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Strategies & Market Trends : The Final Frontier - Online Remote Trading -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TFF who wrote (8749)	2/15/2001 12:03:12 AM
From: Jon Tara	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12617

Oh, cool We can trade "weather" now. Heck, that beats Presidential Elections all to heck. More seriously, is this practical for an individual trader? What kind of capital does it take to trade these contracts? (And is it even possible?) One of the really annoying things about the California energy situation is that they set-up a rigged market. You had to be either a producer or a consumer to trade electrnicity at CAL-PX. There was no opportunity for speculators to enter the market. I suppose they must have somehow thought that by limiting participation to producers and consumers that they were somehow "protecting" the public from manipulation. I think that, in fact, this structure INVITED manipulation, and had speculators been allowed into the market, we would never have had the disasterous results that ensued. BTW, just read an article (Economist? Not sure where I saw it) claiming that California actually has MORE reserve generating capacity than most other states. Yes, we haven't been building new plants, but we had so much excess capacity that we didn't need to. The article said that it's all been basically a put-up, with plants being taken off-line to create an artificial shortage.