See you at Gastech 2025!

📢 Big news: I have been invited to speak at this year’s Gastech conference in Milan.

I will be presenting a paper in the Emerging Gas Pricing Trends session on Wednesday 10th September at 10:30am.

The paper will showcase the Energy Flux methodology to reverse-engineer investment fund positioning in TTF futures. This will be followed by a panel Q&A.

Presenting a paper will be a first for me. As a journalist, normally I am in the audience taking notes and raising my hand. Now the tables are turned...!

The title of my Gastech paper is Mapping the Storage-Speculation Nexus: hedge fund positioning and the TTF forward curve.

This research is based on the three-part series of the same name first published in the Energy Flux newsletter (see parts one, two and three).

The Storage-Speculation Nexus series proved quite popular because it shed light on how investment funds move between different maturities along the TTF forward curve in response to geopolitical events.

For this presentation, I have refined the methodology and extended the observation window to capture the evolution of fund behaviour since the start of 2023. The findings are pretty remarkable.

To give a flavour, the Abstract is copied in full at the end of this post.

If you’re going to Gastech, don’t miss what promises to be an excellent session. I’ll be sharing the stage with other high-calibre speakers and moderator (see the agenda).

I will be in Milan all week so let me know if you would like to meet up; Energy Flux readers have started a discussion thread to coordinate meetings (you can also DM me in the forum).

–Seb

Not going to Gastech? Subscribe to Energy Flux to get the presentation slides plus bonus commentary after the event – now with 50% off 👇

💸 Get half-price subscription 💸

GASTECH ABSTRACT

Emerging Gas Pricing Trends
📅 10 Sep. 10:30 - 11:30am

Mapping the storage-speculation nexus:

Hedge fund positioning and the TTF forward curve

✍️ Seb Kennedy, Founding Editor, Energy Flux

The European natural gas market — anchored by the Title Transfer Facility (TTF) — has drawn growing interest from non-physical investment funds, particularly hedge funds. This influx of capital into TTF futures has reignited concerns about the role of speculative positioning in amplifying price volatility, distorting market signals, and complicating seasonal storage economics. 

Progress in understanding this influence has been limited by sparse and opaque data. The weekly Commitment of Traders (CoT) report for ICE Endex TTF aggregates investment fund positions across all maturities, masking variations in behaviour along the forward curve. While EU regulators collect more granular transaction-level data, only coarse summaries are made public. 

This paper presents an original methodology to reverse-engineer fund positioning across the curve using CoT data in conjunction with weekly volume-weighted average prices (VWAP) for TTF contracts from January 2023 onwards. By calculating the R-squared (coefficient of determination) between weekly price moves and changes in net speculative positions, the analysis quantifies how tightly fund flows have aligned with different segments of the curve over time. 

A marked shift occurred in August 2024 during military escalations near the Sudzha gas transit corridor between Russia and Ukraine. As risk premia spiked, R-squared values collapsed for long-dated contracts (Oct-25, Nov-25) and surged for near-dated ones. The data suggest a repositioning by hedge funds toward summer-dated futures aligned with the EU’s gas storage refilling calendar. 

By late October 2024, speculative interest had become concentrated along the Dec-24 to Sep-25 strip. This crowding coincided with the final weeks of mandated refilling activity ahead of (what was at the time) the 1 November 2025 storage deadline. As summer prices rallied and the summer-winter spread inverted, some operators faced elevated procurement costs and weaker incentives to store, highlighting how tightly coupled regulatory targets and speculative positioning can become.

In response, the EU moved to soften its storage mandates for 2025, citing the need for flexibility. While causality is difficult to establish, this analysis shows how rigid policy structures can create entry points for capital flows that reshape the pricing curve, intentionally or not. 

This study introduces a replicable framework for quantifying the behavioural imprint of speculative flows along the forward curve. It invites traders, regulators, and analysts to move beyond binary debates over “good” or “bad” speculation and instead focus on transparency, policy design, and improved use of public data like the CoT report to understand systemic effects.

Ultimately, this paper advocates for greater transparency in fund positioning data and proposes a data-driven framework to pre-empt systemic price dislocations without unduly deterring market liquidity.