Brother, I could write a book on the ins and outs of natural gas trading, it can be far more complex than one would think. There are so many variables and problems in physical gas. The physical market definately used to be a who you know brotherhood, much moreso than todays market. ICE being the universal trading platform has taken alot of the relationships out of the market as older traders have retired and the young guns have come in knowing only the modern ICE way of trading. Our industry used to be the king industry of boondoggles, there was a trip or high end dinner going on almost non-stop. I used to get invites on a weekly basis to go hunting at high-end game ranhes, fishing at nice lodges, trips to Cabo with Enron, ski trips to Tahoe, etc etc. There were golf tournaments at least monthly with one of the big shops. For the most part, that has all ceased after the fall of Enron, Dynegy and El Paso. The way we do business has changed so much over the last few years that most companies now have one small function a year, a very watered down version of days of past. Our company now has a 3-day Dove hunt in early October at the bosses South Texas ranch. It is first class all the way, but that is all we really do now. Enbridge has a huge Mardi Gras party every year at a hip dowtown Houston place, and most other co's do a single thing now. Getting a trading job is still a who you know thing more than what you know, although there are always exceptions. Most traders coming up into a trading job need to spend time scheduling pipelines as a learning process. There are so many things that can and do go wrong with physical trading, learning how to deal with them is important and why scheduling is usually the gateway to trading as you are knee deep in handling those issues in that capacity. I personally hate trading physical gas, as soon as you think you're printing a mint on a deal, you get cut. Often. Only so much gas can flow through a pipe at any given time, so there are different levels of transortation service to shippers. There are holders of capacity that have firm rights, giving them the first right to transport volumes and squeeze out shippers with lesser rights, secondary firm is the next notch, and interuptable is the last in line. Say there is a good spread to buy gas in south Texas on TETCO pipeline and ship it up to an interconnect in Louisiana, you do the deal and once all the gas is scheduled, there isn't enough capacity to ship because the firm or secondary holders are using all the capacity that day, you are fucked like a housecat. Making matters worse, you sold the gas on another pipeline and are now short supply, (after the spot market has closed for the timely cycle, meaning liquidity to trade out is gone and you may wind up paying much more to cover your supply if you have no other options). I thrive on trading derivatives, I trade the daily spot, but as bare bone as I can as I HATE dealing with cuts.
We have used NECC and are looking at NGX, in my opinion it is all just a pipe dream. It isn't really taking off thusfar, and has thrown ICE timely trading off which has been a royal pain in the ass. I know BP was trying to do 100% of their henry hub trading on NGX, but has deviated a bit from it a few times, I think the liquidity is not there for them yet.