Amaranth Advisors: Burning Six Billion in Thirty Days

This case provides students with a deeper understanding of commodity futures markets in general and natural gas markets in particular. It also provides an introduction to hedge funds and insight into the largest hedge fund collapse in history. Third, it introduces such concepts as liquidity risk, value-at-risk, spread trades and the use of derivatives. As of the case date, Amaranth had not publicly disclosed the positions that led to $6 billion in losses during the month of September 2006. The case was written using public information and provides key pieces of data to allow students to reverse engineer possible positions Amaranth may have held.