The upper panel of this figure shows natural gas futures prices as of June 1, 2007. for ias Futures a range of maturities, while the lower panel shows the futures prices as of January 28 2009. The upper panel appears as Figure 17 he Senate Report (2 The lower pane ral s based on data downloaded from the NYMEX website http://www.nymex.com. Accessed January 29, 2009 enter into long futures contracts at fixed futures prices. (Options on futures are described in Chapter 14.) When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the US in 2005, natural gas prices soared and Amaranth recorded handsome returns. The main strategy followed by Amaranth in 2006 is often described as one that was long winter short summer, that is, as based on a view that the difference between futures prices for winter delivery and those for summer delivery would widen. Broadly speaking, this is correct, but the actual implementation, using NYMEX futures and ICE swaps, was more nuanced and involved several different substrategies. Some of the key substrategies are described below. Short Summer At the beginning of 2006, based on the relatively warm 2005-06 winter and the presence of plentiful gas supplies, Amaranth took the view that gas prices would fall