Subject: PARC Forum, September 29, 4pm, Raj Mahajan speaks on "Energy Trading, the California Debacle, Why Enron was Good, and $70 Oil"

From: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 20:47:21 PDT

"Energy Trading, the California Debacle, Why Enron was Good, and $70 Oil"

Raj Mahajan, SunGard Kiodex

Thursday, 29 September 2005, 4 PM, George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto,
CA.  This forum is OPEN to the public.

ABSTRACT

Energy trading experienced meteoric growth in the 1990s and then 
suffered an equally spectacular collapse in 2002 after the Enron 
implosion and California debacle. There was no single cause but rather a 
confluence of factors contributed to the collapse: flawed deregulation, 
a cavalier approach to creditworthiness, market manipulation, and a 
general "bubble" like attitude towards trading volumes.

Now, the market has recovered and energy trading volumes are surpassing 
their peak from the 1990s. Opportunities and challenges abound. What new 
markets are opening up? Will we see another Enron? Should Wall Street 
banks be in the business of buying and running power plants? Are hedge 
funds driving up the price of oil? This talk will review the recent 
history of energy trading with a focus on North America, what we learned 
from the collapse, and why and how it is rebounding today.

BIOGRAPHY: Raj Mahajan

Raj Mahajan is President of SunGard's Kiodex business unit. Mr. Mahajan 
joined SunGard in September of 2004 with the acquisition of Kiodex, Inc. 
Mr. Mahajan has also worked for Goldman, Sachs & Co. as an investment 
banker, commodities marketer, and principal investor. He helped launch 
Goldman Sachs Power, the firm's electricity trading and risk management 
group. He was also on the founding team that created Orion Power 
Holdings, a Goldman Sachs portfolio company designed to make 
opportunistic investments in the domestic power industry. As an 
undergraduate, Mr. Mahajan received the Ford Foundation's Woodrow Wilson 
Fellowship to study public and international affairs. He holds an MBA 
from Princeton University and a BA from the University of California at 
Berkeley.

ABOUT PARC FORUM:

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is located at 3333 Coyote Hill Road in 
Palo Alto, California.  A road map and driving directions are available 
at http://www.parc.com/company/directions.html  The George Pake 
Auditorium is to the left of the main entrance, near the upper parking 
lot; follow the signs.  For more information about the PARC Forum, see 
http://www.parc.com/forum

UPCOMING FORUMS:

October 6: Dr. Tony DeRose, Pixar Animation Systems, Math in the Movies

October 13: Mark Levine, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, part of the 
Science and Technology for a Sustainable World series

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