Hedging Expected Losses on Derivatives in Electricity Futures Markets

Abstract: We investigate the problem of pricing and hedging derivatives of Electricity Futures contract when the underlying asset is not available. We propose to use a cross hedging strategy based on the Futures contract covering the larger delivery period. A quick overview of market data shows a basis risk for this market incompleteness. For that purpose we formulate the pricing problem in a stochastic target form along the lines of Bouchard and al. (2008), with a moment loss function. Following the same techniques as in the latter, we avoid to demonstrate the uniqueness of the value function by comparison arguments and explore convex duality methods to provide a semi-explicit solution to the problem. We then propose numerical results to support the new hedging strategy and compare our method to the Black-Scholes naive approach.