CASE STUDIES / SCHEDULING · ANALYSIS · 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.
0.06 → -0.23
$/MMBTU · BEST TO WORST OF 56 FEASIBLE SCHEDULES
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. That yields exactly 56 feasible schedules.
Ten schedules, one thin margin.
02 · 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 distribution mean sits at minus nine cents. The spread between best and worst is a swing of $4M on four cargoes.
MEAN -0.09 · MEDIAN -0.08 · WORST -0.23 $/MMBTU
The May cargo costs a million.
03 · THE LOCK
Remove the May pre-lock and the feasible set grows from 56 to 126 schedules. September replaces May in the optimum and the programme more than doubles its value at unchanged forward prices. That is the price of one conceded delivery month.
Two more dials move the number.
04 · THE LEVERS
Splitting each month into start, mid and end windows with shifted indexation weights captures curve-shape premia. Switching the cover leg from TTF to NBP reshapes the whole ranking through friendlier NBP-HH spreads.
≈ +0.3
DECEMBER SPREAD · $/MMBTU
≈ -0.3
MAY SPREAD · LOCKED MONTH
≈ 0.08
INTRA-MONTH WINDOW OPTIMUM
≈ 0.23
NBP-SOURCED OPTIMUM
05 · THE VERDICT
A DES programme lives on six cents per MMBtu, and one pre-locked month can push the whole book into loss.
FORWARD-CURVE EVALUATION ONLY · COVER ALWAYS SOURCEABLE · MONTE CARLO FLAGGED AS FOLLOW-UP
THIS ANALYSIS RAN ON X-LNG
The whole analysis, priced inside the optimisation that plans your fleet.
X-LNG runs analyses like this on whole portfolios in seconds, so the answer sits in every netback, diversion and charter call rather than in a spreadsheet weeks later.
