European power trading innovation: The imperfection of data

While transparency and data provision have made huge strides, there are still information gaps and quality problems, warns the founder of UK power analysis firm Catalyst Commodities

“We have, in addition to our presentations and expert written analysis, invested massively in our platform—that is our extra five people.” So says Paul Monk, who founded UK power price forecasting service Catalyst Commodities in 2014 after over a decade of power trading and analysis experience with French utility EdF and with Deutsche Bank. Given Monk’s spend on data processing capabilities, one might expect him to be a full-throated evangelist for the information explosion in the UK and European power markets. But he has some caveats, around quality of data and around the UK market’s much-vaunted commitment to transparency.   Catalyst fo