Working From Home For the Holidays – Tips for Risk Analysts

December 2, 2020

As most risk analysts know, it’s difficult to truly observe a local holiday at home when your company does international trade deals with countries all over the world.

It’s scarcely any different for those of us who work in the business of distributing, collecting, or analyzing market data. The imports, exports, and pipeline flows you need to analyze don’t stop coming in because it’s a holiday. And neither does the data that Enverus delivers.

This fact of the business was all too real for some of us over the past Thanksgiving holiday. The Friday after Thanksgiving may seem to be a sacred holiday to us in the United States, but the rest of the world is still open for business. As my American colleagues and I struggled through Teams meetings on the Monday morning after a long weekend, one admitted he got pulled back in to his work-from-home office due to the non-stop and global nature of our business.

This year, most of us will be staying home for the holidays. And for some of us, this means working from home for the holidays, probably for the first time ever. Striking a work-life balance in 2020 has been a delicate tightrope walk, especially for the members of our workforce who also happen to be raising families.

How can energy analysts and traders strike the right balance – especially during the busy end-of-year season when family time matters most?

1. Make the most of automation – cut down on process
  When it comes to forward curves risk management, it’s pretty simple: if your forward curves aren’t automated, you’re doing it wrong. Maybe you’re manually managing dozens of individual data integration points, or using multiple Excel spreadsheets with cross-workbook references to generate curves. Ask yourself, why? Your time is precious, and there’s a faster way.
  
  We recently presented a public demo of our CurveBuilder technology, which shows how quickly anyone on the trade floor can create a new and complex curve. Our team also showed how forward curve formulas can be quickly updated and edited between traders and analysts. You can watch the full presentation here.
2. Get holiday calendars in line (and automated)
  In commodity markets, missing a calendar roll can cost analysts and traders big. It’s no small task to maintain and manage the various market calendars that are ever changing, rolling and taking bank holidays.
  
  Enverus Calendar Manager changes that and takes away all the stress of aligning calendars in order to create accurate forward curve analysis. Watch our demo and skip to 19:30 to get straight to CurveBuilder calendar feature that literally makes our customers cheer!
3. Save time on end-of-year audits – track every change
  Risk managers and traders know all about how important it is to get thorough audits done in a timely matter. For the risk managers who are tasked with identifying every possible market risk and must maintain a mitigation strategy that is constantly updated and provided to executive teams, CurveBuilder’s audit trails are a business necessity.
  
  With CurveBuilder, risk analysts and traders are beginning to see how much easier forward curve risk management can be. The tool is easy to use; and users find the sophistication of simplicity when using CurveBuilder to assemble forward curves.
  
  Bringing an enterprise-wide solution to your trade shop – and one that helps everyone in your organization thrive, even while working from home – can take months to consider and approve internally. To get a more digestible idea of what’s possible with CurveBuilder, try signing up for our proof of concept.