Why Short-Term Power Traders Are Drowning in Spreadsheets
- Ron Swartz
- Oct 14
- 2 min read
Walk onto any trading floor in the power markets today, and you’ll see the same scene: A dozen screens glowing with Excel, emails flying, screenshots taped into slide decks, and half a dozen browser tabs pretending to be “real-time.”
This is the modern short-term power trader’s toolkit — duct-taped together under pressure to make million-dollar calls in minutes — all trying to answer one simple question: “What’s happening right now?”
It’s madness. Million-dollar decisions made through duct-taped workflows. One trader’s got macros, another’s got a homegrown tool, someone else is pulling ISO data from a CSV emailed at 3 a.m.
And somehow, that’s considered normal.
The Hidden Cost of Fragmentation
Every minute spent juggling spreadsheets, inboxes, and PDFs is a minute not spent actually trading. Yet that’s how most desks still run.
Want to check what ERCOT load forecasts did overnight? That’s one file.Need to reconcile position deltas from the last hour? That’s another.Now cross-check it with ISO prices and weather? Open three more tabs.
By the time you have the full picture, the opportunity’s gone. The market moved.
We hear this all the time:
“We don’t need another dashboard. We need answers.”
Exactly. Traders don’t need more data—they’re drowning in it. What’s missing is situational awareness.
Duct Tape Doesn’t Scale
Some of the smartest traders I know have built brilliant spreadsheets that rival commercial tools. But here’s the truth: once the market changes, those homegrown models start to creak. The macros break. The data feed drops. The latency creeps in.
And then, the whole desk ends up playing IT instead of trading.
This friction isn’t just annoying—it’s expensive. Every lag in situational awareness is a lost edge. Every manual process is a hidden cost.
The Spreadsheet Trap for Short-Term Power Traders
Let’s be honest — spreadsheets were the best innovation the industry ever had.But they were never built for today’s volatility, or the data velocity of real-time markets.
Now, they’ve become a liability.
When macros break, your situational awareness breaks.
When the market shifts, your formulas don’t keep up.
And every trader ends up playing IT instead of playing the market.
The Next Step: Automation That Thinks Like a Trader
What traders really need is a system that understands context—one that pulls together real-time ISO data, weather signals, and positions, then tells you what matters right now.
Not another static dashboard. A co-pilot for short-term power.
From Data Overload to Situational Awareness
The answer isn’t another layer of visualization. It’s automation that thinks like a trader.
That’s exactly what we’re building. A platform that automates situational awareness so traders can stop chasing spreadsheets—and start trading the market in front of them.
Stay tuned.
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