It really annoys me that when I chart on the ICE platform I can't see the historical bid/asks, and there is no historical level II equivalent. Makes it hard to see historical liquidity.
If they do this right, and make the power futures just like any other product on ICE Futures US, liquidity and volumes should increase drastically which should offset any loss ICE will have from the fees for using their proprietary trading platform (which is a POS). You'll start to see many more specs entering, right now it's mostly dominated by naturals, making liquidity thin. Once the specs move in we should finally get decently quoted markets.
There are some very sophisticated HF's and private equity firms with very elaborate bidding algorithms for bal day inc/dec regimes like PJM-W. It gets gamed quite a bit, and there is great pain in the Summer. One thousand percent vol intraday I have seen. Not something I would recommend to my clients - and I have two clients who specifically trade that market.
West Oaks just got blown up on a bidding error recently. I'm hearing it was put in backwards and cost them $7mm+. As far as charting power swaps, I'd be interested in what you're actually looking for seeing as though they are completely different than if you were charting equities for technical studies.
So for example for G/WH unless I'm watching it every second of every day, because it's so thinly traded I have no idea if there was even a bid or offer out at any point in the day. Same for most other locational spread swaps. Also if you want to put on a big position you may want to do it when the market is most liquid for whatever point you're looking at. Sure, I could watch the market for a few weeks, but in every other futures market I can get historical bid/asks/size not just lasts, which is all that is available on the ICE platform.
Sure, I wouldn't recommend it to someone not familiar with the market, but if Joe Schmoe wants to try his hand at power and hand over his money, so be it...
You're not going to be able to see "true" and "relevant" historical bid / asks for a very simple reason: what is shown on WebICE is not the complete market by any stretch of the imagination . Big time US OTC swaps electricity brokerage firms like ICAP, Prebon Yamane, Tradition, Amerex, etc. etc. have many clients who they show markets to via IM and voice in products that when filled are financially cleared on either ICE-LCH or Clearport - but those bids, offers, and even fills do not show up on the WebICE screen real-time ( or TT or whatever ) because the clients do not necessarily desire that. Actually, I would wager that most institutional and large spec accounts do not. The big swinging dicks want the anonymity. The fills, however, will appear in the exchange settlement data much later after the close.
Oh come on, no one is going to voice broker a bal day. I could see what you're saying for a monthly but intramonth?