CASE STUDIES / SCHEDULING · DEC 2025
The wrong delivery months erase the margin.
Every feasible delivery schedule for a European DES short, evaluated against the forward curve. Month selection alone swings the programme from profit to a multi-million loss.
-$3.2M
WHAT THE WORST OF 56 FEASIBLE SCHEDULES LOSES · THE BEST EARNS +$0.84M ON THE SAME FOUR CARGOES
One short, fifty-six ways to serve it.
01 · THE CONTRACT
A four-cargo DES short against spot DES cover, April to December 2026. One cargo is contractually locked into May, leaving three delivery months to choose from eight: exactly 56 feasible schedules. The first-best plan is easy to compute, but often not executable against business restrictions, so the deliverable is the full ranking of every plan, not a single answer.
FORWARD-CURVE EVALUATION · ADP = ANNUAL DELIVERY PROGRAMME · MONTE CARLO FLAGGED AS THE FOLLOW-UP STUDY
The curve decides which months pay.
02 · THE SPREAD
The monthly spread between the short's HH-linked price and the TTF-linked cover is the whole game. July, August and December are the only months above water; the pre-locked May sits at roughly -$0.30 per MMBtu and drags every feasible schedule down with it.
Ten schedules, one thin margin.
03 · THE RANKING
The best plan, May-July-August-December, earns six cents per MMBtu. By rank ten the programme is already loss-making, and the average of all 56 schedules sits at minus nine cents: a swing of roughly $4M between best and worst on four cargoes.
Every constraint has a price tag.
04 · THE LEVERS
Re-running the same contract under different rules shows what each clause is worth. Freeing the May lock more than doubles the programme. Excluding December turns everything loss-making. Intra-month windows with shifted indexation weights unlock curve-shape premia, and an NBP-sourced cover nearly quadruples the base optimum through friendlier NBP-HH spreads.
05 · THE VERDICT
A DES programme lives on six cents per MMBtu:
and one pre-locked month can push the whole book into loss.
Time-window selection is a primary P&L lever, not an operational afterthought. Whoever ranks every feasible schedule knows the price of each concession before the negotiation starts.
What the 56 schedules teach.
06 · TAKEAWAYS
The full ranking beats the first-best
The top schedule is easy to find, but it is often not executable against counterparty demands. Ranking all 56 plans shows what each concession costs: by rank ten the programme is already loss-making.
Single months are worth millions
Freeing the pre-locked May cargo lifts the best plan from $0.84M to $1.75M, a 108% uplift. Excluding December, which sits in every top-10 schedule, turns ALL remaining feasible plans loss-making. Every calendar concession has a price tag.
This is the forward-curve lens only
Margins are thin, the mean schedule loses nine cents per MMBtu, and the curve moves daily; rankings must be refreshed. A stochastic Monte Carlo treatment of window risk is flagged as the follow-up study.
Modelled with X-LNG.
07 · THE TOOL
Your world goes in
Contracts, vessels, charter rates, prices, spot assumptions and constraints. The full book, not a slice.
One optimal plan comes out
Feasible, P&L-maximising and constraint-compliant, re-solved for every scenario in minutes.
Every number checks out
Each result can be recalculated by hand. Transparency your risk committee can audit.
CLOUD-BASED, ANY PORTFOLIO SIZE · BUILT AND ADVANCED DAILY BY ~25 MATHEMATICIANS, PHYSICISTS AND COMPUTER SCIENTISTS