Chart Deck

TTF to the moon?

EU gas price surges past €60 per MWh. But is the top already in?

Seb Kennedy

24 Jul 2026 — 14 min read

European gas has found its fear gear again.

Dutch TTF, the European gas benchmark, smashed through €60 per MWh this week and above the wartime peaks of March, when Iranian missiles were still landing on Ras Laffan.

With the front-month contract flirting with €64, the market is belatedly realising that the Strait of Hormuz will stay shut for far longer than anyone had dared to price (despite ample signs that ceasefire optimism was grossly misplaced).

The intractability of the US-Iran war is now plain for all to see, and hedging for peace is losing its allure.

Last month’s ceasefire memorandum is a distant memory and indirect talks are going nowhere; Tehran is warning tankers to stick to its designated routes while hulls that stray get hit; Trump is now thirteen consecutive nights into a renewed bombing campaign, and reportedly “close” to a decision on a “massive attack” bigger than anything yet. And he is threatening to flatten a bridge or power plant every time Iran fires on a ship in Hormuz. Iran’s Houthi allies have dragged the Red Sea into the fight, striking Saudi tankers and threatening to blockade Bab al-Mandeb (while letting Chinese and Russian ships slip through).

Bellicose rhetoric and vessel strikes are drowning out diplomacy, and Hormuz transits have slowed to a trickle. The consequences are cascading through the gas world: Asian buyers are scrambling to replace lost Qatari and UAE cargoes at premiums $40-50 million per vessel, JKM is defending a fat premium over TTF out to at least Q1 2027, and Europe’s storage injection deficit is widening by the week as EU LNG imports slide. The stage is set for a proper winter tug-of-war between Europe and Asia over every flexible cargo afloat.

Little wonder this week’s subscriber-only Chart Deck reads like a cockpit full of flashing red lights. Our TTF Sentiment gauge is firmly bullish, as is the TTF Risk Model, with almost every input dropping hard in unison. The LNG Physical Balance score spat out a dramatically bullish print of its own. US LNG windfall profits are soaring, and EU gas storages are likely to start winter closer to 70% full than 80%. Signal after signal points the same way — and subscribers can see exactly which levels, spreads and thresholds they translate into.

Download this week’s Chart Deck

The risk ceiling beckons

And yet. Regular readers will recall that last week we flagged investment funds were about to run out of road: our risk-budget maths put their buying ceiling at roughly 248 TWh net long. The latest positioning data landed at 247 TWh. We won’t claim clairvoyance (some of that fit was luck, as explained below) but when a rally’s marginal buyer stops within a rounding error of where your model said they had to, you pay attention.

To sharpen that read, this week’s deck rolls out a substantially enhanced Value-at-Risk analysis: a new suite of charts that pulls apart exactly what drives the risk that funds carry in TTF: position, price and volatility. The analysis reveals how close today’s book sits to the levels where position-building has historically stalled.

The headline finding: fund risk is now at the 90th percentile, territory that usually precedes a pullback. And the composition of that risk today looks nothing like the March blow-off, which changes what happens next.

So: TTF to the moon, or a rally that has quietly eaten its own headroom? Below the paywall we stress-test our ceiling call against the fresh positioning data, show why the exact volatility measure you use matters more than anyone’s view on the war, and set out the precise levels — in TWh and €/MWh — at which the hedge position either finds fresh fuel or buckles under its own weight.

On our numbers, the answer to this week’s headline question is closer than the tape suggests.