National Safe Securities Agency

During the past decade, natural gas markets have witnessed several critical upheavals: increasing market volatility, greater geopolitical risks and penetration of disruptive technologies. In this fast evolving environment, uncertainty expands without any frontier along many dimensions simultaneously. Against this background of tidal changes, the identification and assessment of incoming economic opportunities and risks has become decisive. In this paper, we present an innovative method to overcome the challenge by leveraging an advanced digital: the abstract syntax tree. Our approach consists in the systemic assessment of an exhaustive continuum of physically possible outcomes to identify the underlying key risks and opportunities areas associated with natural gas trading activities, hence building a risk-opportunity topology along several dimensions for traders. We demonstrate that such risk-opportunity topologies enable their users to depart from a hope-for-the-best attitude towards the traditional low-medium-high scenarios and achieve a systemic understanding where the risk-opportunity continuum can be characterized into fragile, robust and anti-fragile areas.