Foretec

Every desk wants a proven track record. There is nowhere to build one.

Foretec runs live competitions on real European electricity market data. Participants forecast, bid across day-ahead and intraday, and carry the imbalance. Every entry is scored on the money it would actually have made.

96 settlement periods · one day of imbalance prices

You run a wind farm. How much of its output do you sell day-ahead?

Your renewable asset the output you forecast and sell
Storage optional, an extra column in the submission
Any European zone market and assets set by the edition’s sponsor

where you end up, day-ahead only where you could end up if you also trade intraday

Day-ahead only · – –
Recoverable in intraday –
Drag across the chart.
How this is scored

Sell more than you generate and you buy the shortfall back at the imbalance price; sell less and the surplus settles cheap. The optimal commitment therefore sits below your median forecast. The shaded area is what a second trade in intraday could still recover once the forecast has sharpened. It widens as your day-ahead commitment gets worse, because there is more error left to correct.

100% = selling actual generation at the day-ahead price. Day-ahead €80/MWh, intraday €72 sell / €90 buy, imbalance €108 short / €58 long with occasional spikes. Forecast median 55.5 % of capacity. Illustrative conditions, not a specific market or trading day.

The demo assumes a well-calibrated forecast and a known price asymmetry, so it isolates the commitment decision from the forecasting problem. A real edition is harder: participants supply the distribution as well as the position, and nobody knows in advance which way the system will be short.

The same shortlist circulates, and the evidence arrives after the hire.

€20–37k

Typical agency fee for one quantitative hire in European power trading, at 15–25 % of first-year salary, for a candidate whose models nobody has measured.

€7k / month

What a European transmission system operator already pays forecasters, per market, ranked on accuracy alone. Crowdsourced forecasting is operational, not hypothetical.

None

There is no recurring, multi-sponsor venue dedicated to European energy trading talent. Firms run their own, occasionally, behind closed doors.

Every job advert in this market asks for a proven track record, and there is no venue in which anyone can build one. Foretec is that venue: neutral, recurring, and open to the whole market rather than to one employer.

How an edition works

  1. 01

    Join and warm up

    Entry is open all year. New participants start with a warm-up month on live data: the same gates and settlement, but no prizes. There is no qualifying round on historical data, because every score on Foretec comes from forecasts committed before the outcome was known. We publish the settled data series, a baseline model and tutorials, and Energy Bench gives everyone strong open forecasts to build on.

  2. 02

    Commit, every day

    Before each gate, submit a probabilistic forecast and a position, then revise it intraday. Every submission is timestamped and locked on our server before the market it targets closes. Nothing can be changed or resubmitted after the fact.

  3. 03

    Settle against the real market

    Positions settle against real market outcomes:

    • Day-ahead at the published clearing price.
    • Intraday against real exchange prices.
    • Any remaining imbalance at the imbalance price, including the effect your own imbalance would have had on it.

    Your score is the share of perfect-foresight revenue you capture.

  4. 04

    Monthly awards, annual title, meet the top

    Each month has its own leaderboard and award. The annual table decides the main prize, so one lucky month or one season does not decide the winner. Sponsors see the ranked pool throughout the year and can contact anyone. Participants compete under pseudonyms and choose when to reveal who they are.

What a submission looks like
submission · edition 01 · gate DAY-AHEAD required optional
period position_mw battery_mw p10 p50 p90 00:0041.5−2.028.343.161.000:1543.0−2.029.644.762.800:3044.20.030.946.064.100:4545.1+3.531.447.265.701:0046.8+3.532.748.967.2 ⋮⋮⋮ ⋮⋮⋮ 23:4538.6+1.0 25.240.357.9

96 periods, one row each. A single column of positions is a valid entry; the optional columns are where the edition is won.

Read the full mechanics: gates, settlement formulas, the price-impact model, what the platform publishes and the edition calendar.

The aggregate

The crowd competes too

Every submission is aggregated into a single meta-forecast that enters the leaderboard under its own name, scored on both tracks like any other participant.

Live now

The forecasting half is already running, in public.

Energy Bench forecasts European power markets every day before the day-ahead gate. Every model gets the same frozen public inputs, and every forecast is scored against the grid operators’ actuals.

Dozens

of forecasting models: time-series foundation models, gradient boosting, and the grid operators’ own forecasts.

4 targets

Price, wind, solar and load across multiple European bidding zones, every quarter-hour.

Daily

Locked before the 12:00 gate since 2 October 2026. Every forecast and score is open data.

See the leaderboard →Open dataset →