C. Natural Gas Spread Trades
Amaranth's collapse was mainly due to losses in the trading of natural gas. To understand the Amaranth collapse, one needs to understand the mechanics of trading natural gas futures, options, and swaps.
1. Trading Natural Gas
In this section, some basic features of trading natural gas futures on the NYMEX and ICE exchanges are discussed. Traders in natural gas futures have several options. The largest exchange for trading natural gas futures is the NYMEX, which has futures contracts of consecutive delivery months up to five years out. They also have options on all of the futures contracts, as well as spread options which pay off on the difference between futures contract prices of two different months. The initial margin requirement on futures contracts vary by type of trader (non-member customer, member customer, and clearing member and customer) and also vary by time to maturity of the contract. Contracts closer to delivery have stricter margin requirements. To give a flavor of the margin differences as a percentage of notional value, on August 31, 2006, $12,150 was required for each October 2006 contract (Tier 1), which had a futures value of $60,480, thus, representing about 20% of the futures notional position. The March 2007 contract had a margin requirement of $7,425 (Tier 5) with a
C. Natural Gas Spread Trades
Amaranth's collapse was mainly due to losses in the trading of natural gas. To understand the Amaranth collapse, one needs to understand the mechanics of trading natural gas futures, options, and swaps.
1. Trading Natural Gas
In this section, some basic features of trading natural gas futures on the NYMEX and ICE exchanges are discussed. Traders in natural gas futures have several options. The largest exchange for trading natural gas futures is the NYMEX, which has futures contracts of consecutive delivery months up to five years out. They also have options on all of the futures contracts, as well as spread options which pay off on the difference between futures contract prices of two different months. The initial margin requirement on futures contracts vary by type of trader (non-member customer, member customer, and clearing member and customer) and also vary by time to maturity of the contract. Contracts closer to delivery have stricter margin requirements. To give a flavor of the margin differences as a percentage of notional value, on August 31, 2006, $12,150 was required for each October 2006 contract (Tier 1), which had a futures value of $60,480, thus, representing about 20% of the futures notional position. The March 2007 contract had a margin requirement of $7,425 (Tier 5) with a
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