Trading on short-term path forecasts of intraday electricity prices

We introduce a profitable trading strategy that can support decision-making in continuous intraday markets for electricity. It utilizes a novel forecasting framework, which generates prediction bands from a pool of path forecasts or approximates them using probabilistic price forecasts. The prediction bands then define a time-dependent price level that, when exceeded, indicates a good trading opportunity. Results for the German intraday market show that, in terms of the energy score, our path forecasts beat two well performing literature benchmarks by over 30%. Moreover, the forecasts provide empirical evidence that the increased computational burden induced by generating realistic price paths is offset by higher trading profits. Still, the proposed approximate and bootstrap-based methods offer a reasonable trade-off — they do not require generating path forecasts and yield only slightly lower profits.