How do you deal with customers who, on the one hand, generate most of their revenue from the honest work of doing A for person B, while on the other hand, generate profits from completely esoteric financial and political engineering?
The kind of small energy companies that answer the phone when a startup calls.
Presumably if you had an idea for how to do the forecasts profitably you'd just become an energy futures trader yourself.
I don't know, I'm not trying to poo-poo your thing. But the ESG / Biden green energy plan / renewables stuff your people are excited about, you make a lot more profit just by showing up and harvesting the incentives than you do like, doing a good job.
Berkshire did this (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/warren...) and it's funny, those people were a scam. That's what I'm trying to say. Profits are pretty dodgy in the energy industry.
I like this teeny tiny example though, Active Power, that became a Net Operating Loss shell (also common for biotech), because energy has an easier time booking losses as R&D expenses (https://seekingalpha.com/article/4126904-p10-industries-purc...).
I don't know. There are so, so many examples of hilarious bad actors, from which the profits for small energy businesses come. You're not making forecasts for Exxon, you're doing it for little tiny energy providers. How, really, are they profitable at all?
Now, if we could get enough interest to make such a short-term futures market and trade on it directly... we'd love to!