Contest Summary
Welcome to Celsius Energy's Natural Gas Storage Contest! This is a 10-week contest designed to measure its participants' skill in projecting natural gas weekly injections or withdrawals and natural gas price movements. There contest is free to enter and does not require any personal information. The contest objectives are simple. At 12 pm EDT each Thursday following the EIA's weekly Storage Report, the contest will open for entrants to submit their projections for the natural gas storage week ending the next day (Friday) to be reported by the EIA the following Thursday. Entrants will also submit their forecast for the price of natural gas as of the close of trading the following Thursday. Entries for that week will be accepted until the following Tuesday at 5 pm EDT. See the schedule to the right for timing of entries and storage periods. Because submitting picks earlier carries increased uncertainty, entrants will be rewarded a "bonus multiple" of up to 3x their weekly score should they submit their picks right at 12 pm at the open of that week's submission which will then decline in a linear fashion to 1x should they submit their picks right at the Tuesday 5pm close. The contest will run for a total of 10 weeks with each entrant's 2 worst weeks discarded. Only one submission per entrant per week is allowed.
Scoring will be determined by the following equation:
Weekly Score = Bonus Multiple X {(12-storage projection error) + (0.12 - price error)x150}
11/9/2017 Scoring Addendum: Beginning in Week 2 of the contest, in order to more fairly weight the challenge in forecasting natural gas price, this component of the score will be weighted 1.5x that of the storage projection. This is reflected in the updated scoring equation above. This adjustment will not impact Week 1 scores.
For example, should an entrant miss that week's storage injection/withdrawal by 3 BCF and that week's closing price by $0.07/MMBTU and entered sufficiently early to earn a 2.2x bonus multiple, his/her score would be: 2.2 X (9 + 5) or 30.8. Of note, there are no negative points so if an entrant misses their storage pick by more than 12 BCF or their price pick by more than $0.12/MMBTU, they receive a 0 for that portion of their score.
Because this is the first time that I am running this contest, I reserve the right to adjust this formula on a weekly basis to ensure that the contest is as fair as possible. Any changes will be announced ahead of time and will not impact previous week's scores.
Contest rankings will update between 6pm and 10pm each Thursday. At the end of the 10-week contest period, the top 10 scoring entrants will receive the prices shown to the right.
If you have any thoughts, questions, concerns or recommendations regarding this contest, please email me at CelsiusEnergyFM@gmail.com.
Click HERE for full contest rules and regulations.
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