Front-Office Strategic Planning

Kolobara Law Firm offers assistance to our front-office clients with the ultimate objective of minimizing legal and financial exposure. We offer assistance with comprehensive and timely communication and analysis of trading or hedging strategies across trading-related functions, such as the front office, middle office and back office, so the risk can be properly identified, quantified and managed. This is especially important for those companies that operate on a “silo” platform--where many affiliates may be performing some trading/hedging functions, independently from one another. We help our clients to monitor and manage the totality of trading exposure, from the enterprise stand point.

Kolobara Law Firm assists our clients with evaluation of individual trades and trading or hedging strategies to ensure that there is a clear, legitimate business purpose behind all physical and financial components of the portfolio. We provide guidance and counsel to ensure that the front office personnel is properly informed and trained not to do anything which could be interpreted as unlawfully affecting the prices or restraining the markets, and to foster sound trading practices with an emphasis on core values of integrity and honesty.
 
Kolobara Law Firm continuously monitors the evolving regulatory developments in order to identify and evaluate relevant legal or regulatory factors impacting the formation or implementation of trading or hedging strategies. We are particularly focused on assisting our clients with identifying and managing their exposure to potential changes in mark-to-market sensitivity, performance triggers, bona-fide hedging designation, margin cost management, market liquidity, mandatory clearing requirements, price volatility, cost of capital, position limits, physical hedging options, portfolio compression, and business conduct standards.

We are particularly mindful that those entities with a core business other than trading (load serving utilities, local distribution companies, municipal power and gas entities, electric cooperatives) are generally going to be more exposed to the increased cost of hedging, because they usually do not have the operational or financial need for robust trading or risk management resources. Kolobara Law Firm assists such clients with legal or regulatory counsel to assist in identifying and implementing the optimum trading or hedging strategy while, at the same time, always keeping focused on operational reliability and energy costs to ratepayers.