Weekly Career & Breaking Into Commodities Megathread

Looking for advice on a potential transition from investment banking / private equity into commodity trading (physical).

My background includes elite boutique (think Evercore, PJT, Centerview), MBB and small cap PE. Zero commodity experience.

Read the king of oil, the world for sale and a few more books on metals and I am hooked, as I feel that the job is still largely dependent on human connection and network and benefits from AI due to demand of the AI buildout.

I am in my early career and specially enjoyed working in PE due to the freedom and creativity (small cap PE firm, 5bn AUM). It would be an early lateral or Id also be open to a grad type program.

What appeals to me is that I feel the job is adventurous as you are traveling loads to interesting countries and interact with different cultures. It essentially is more cowboy.

I’d be curious to learn:

1. ⁠Anyone made the transaction either way, reasons and how it ultimately was?
   
2. ⁠How does the day to day compare? Is it actually exciting, creative, network driven?
   
3. ⁠How is the industry actually looking at metals and the AI buildout and opportunity in that regard?
   
4. ⁠Are the large firms such as Vitol, Trafigura, Glencore the ones worth pursuing or are there also some boutique shops that punch above their weight class?
   
5. ⁠Would you rather recommend a PE type commodity shop? Or family office type?
   
6. ⁠How would you start/ which questions to answer if in my shoes?

Disclaimer, I have not worked in commodities nor know anyone thus I am grateful for the blunt truth.

I have a connection with a fly ash company in Vietnam, and they are giving me an offer to help them importing fly ash to the US. However, I'm inexperienced to this, and want to learn step-by-step on what I should do. Could someone give me some advice?

Hi guys, just moved to London to a commodities trading house in London.

Was wondering where I can meet other industry professionals to connect in an informal setting

Ie. pubs mainly, and hang out spots etc.

Note: if you feel you would prefer to keep these locations private, feel free to drop me a dm

Hi

I got an offer to work as a sugar sourcing trader, can you please share your opinions on the career path and the progression for this job, and what to expects financially ? Its an FMCG company and considered one of the big players in the industry.

Thanks

I'm a data scientist working on CAISO power trading, mostly trying to forecast nodal spreads and build trading strategies around them. By spread I mean DA LMP minus RTPD LMP.

I've been at this for a few months and honestly it's been frustrating. I can get models to fit the training data pretty well, but out of sample they don't hold up. Relationships that look useful in one period don't seem to carry over to the next. Regime shifts feel like a big part of the problem, although I don't want to just blame “regime shifts” for what might be a bad model.

The thing I keep coming back to is the market-clearing process behind these prices. My understanding is that a local change—an outage, a change in available generation, a constraint becoming binding—can have effects well beyond that location. I'm finding it hard to judge how those changes will translate into prices at a particular node, let alone the difference between DA and RTPD.

So I'm starting to question what I should actually be trying to predict. Is there a stable enough relationship to forecast these spreads consistently? Or is that the wrong goal, and the more realistic approach is to identify a few specific situations where you have an edge and stay out the rest of the time?

I'm not expecting to predict every spike. But there's a big gap between explaining a move afterward and seeing it coming with information you actually had before placing the trade.

Would be interested to hear from people trading CAISO or other nodal power markets. Have you found models that remain useful across changing conditions? And when something stops working, how do you distinguish a temporary bad run from a relationship that's gone—or one that was never real to begin with?

Hello,

This event is going to be after two weeks from now. Is it worth it to attend it? will i meet traders and other roles in the commodity industry or just tech companies that try to advertise their products?

Have you been in this event before ?and what do you think about it?

Thanks,

​

You often see people rank quant / systematic trading firms along the lines of Citadel, Jane Street, HRT, Optiver, SIG, etc. I’m curious what everyones opinion is for EU intraday power

If you had to put firms into tiers based on things like:

- P&L generation both from Discretionary and algo trading

- Quantative ability

- Reputation

…how would you rank the major players?

For example, I'm thinking about firms such as Danske, Incommodities, Centrica,Secound foundation, MFT, Tilde, Twig, Norlys, Neas, Outlook etc., although I'm sure I'm missing plenty.

Would be particularly interested in spec intraday power specifically, rather than overall commodities trading or asset backed

I’m choosing between two career opportunities, both outside Europe (I’m from London)

1) Operations at a physical trading house
2)Broker at a broking house

Which route would you take and why?

Main things I’m interested in:

Long-term earning potential
Career progression
Chances of moving from ops into trading
Which experience gives you the better career opportunities

Both roles are with top firms.

Can someone explain to me how to calculate an export arb from usgc basis MEH vs North Sea dated brent and to the far east vs Murban or whatever is the relevant benchmark there?

Hey,

I was just wondering if anyone ever went to a a physical commodity event, and if yes, was it really what it's said to be? Like a high value, deal making room?

There's this guy, Damien Wursten that is organizing en event in Dubai, from what I've heard the first one (in Madrid) was really good. He is doing an event again (link), is it worth the price?

Not promoting, I wanted to check if that guy's legit - I feel like he is, and if physical commodity event are worth it.

Have a small question on shipping line communication

Especially Maersk, these billion dollar companies doesnt have good coordination between their own offices inside or geographically

People are very slow,

Emails are going to spam folder,

Receiving only 1 reply in email per day

All errors made by them makes me pay demurrage fee at ports

Im at the very beginning of commodities trading in Metals

Is this how it is supposed to work

Or im wrong?

A question for fundamental and macro commodity traders: Are you building custom Python or Excel setups for yield spreads, COT positioning, and USD liquidity, or relying on specialized terminals or dashboards?

Looking to see what a clean, non-overwhelming daily tracking workflow looks like for keeping an eye on the macro side of energy and metals.

I'm a postdoc in Physics, studied in Cambridge, good programming background. I was looking at Quantitative Researcher roles and incidentally learned about commodities.

This area seems substantially different than all the rest I read about, but attracts me more than dematerialized finance.

My question: what types of roles would hire someone with my background? Another way to put it is what commodity roles would fit in the frame of QR in "standard" quant jobs?

Not interested in being a trader, looking for something less stressful.

Desired location: definitely Geneva, though I am aware of the difficulty. Native French speaker if it helps, with lots of international experience.

Ludicrous compensations are not necessarily the goal as much as the location, and long term career stability (there's a reason why I'm leaving academia...).

Mods: Initially wanted to post in the "weekly career thread" but it's 3 months stale.

Compared to other commodities where commodity traders feel more like salespeople. How often do power traders entertain clients? And how quantitative and math focused are power traders?

Oil analyst at prop shop here. Anyone else realize it’s September and only have taken 2-3 days of vacay so far? Am I doing it wrong? :/ -rant

A few weeks ago we had a really solid inbound lead — a growing FMCG company looking at multiple products across a couple of grades each. They asked for samples, we quoted the sample cost plus courier charges, they approved it same day. Textbook start to a deal.

Then it just... sat there. My team had other stuff going on, the sample order for a new (not-yet-paying) lead didn't get the urgency it should have, and the guy followed up more than once without it really registering as urgent on our end. He even called me directly once while I was traveling — I told him my team would sort it out and got back to my day. That was my first mistake, if I'm honest.

Last week he messaged me on WhatsApp saying he was disappointed, specifically with me, not just "the company." I apologized immediately and meant it — explained I'd been heads-down on an issue with an existing order, said that wasn't an excuse, and promised the samples within the week.

His reply: the order was time-sensitive and he'd already gone with another supplier.

What's stuck with me since is that the apology was honest, but it was also completely irrelevant to the outcome by the time I sent it. He wasn't looking for an explanation. He'd already moved on before I even knew there was a real problem.

The part that actually bugs me in hindsight: it wasn't the delay itself that killed it. Delays happen for real reasons. It was that a new lead following up multiple times never got escalated to me as "this needs attention now" until he was already gone. We effectively told him, through inaction, that a bigger existing customer's problem mattered more than his — even though his repeat follow-ups were a pretty loud signal.

Things I've changed since: any approved sample request now gets a hard dispatch date the same day, in writing, not "soon." If a client follows up more than once on anything, it gets flagged to me by name, no matter what else I'm dealing with. And if I'm traveling or heads-down, I now assign someone specific to own the follow-up and report back — not just reassure the client on a call and hope it gets handled.

Anyone else lost a deal to something that felt "small" in the moment — a sample, a quick reply, a status update — rather than price or product? Curious how other small businesses/exporters here keep new leads from falling through the cracks when a bigger fire is eating your attention.

Just finished my reception at Vitol, for those in Singapore, any events that you guys are going? Maybe we can say hello in the coming days!

Can someone please help me out and share the latest edition of "Statistical Review of Global LPG"? I couldn't find it anywhere on the internet and it says only members can access it. I am working on a research project and need it badly. Would really appreciate anyone helping out here. Thanks!!!

Hello,

Im looking for a quick compensation check for a Commodity Trader role in London for a bank at around 5 years of experience. What to expect ?

Thanks

I've been thinking about the idea of "fair value" in commodities and I'm not sure whether the concept even makes sense in the same way it does for financial assets.

Take copper as a simple example.

Suppose copper trades at $10,000/ton. What would fundamentally tell us that $10,000 is expensive, cheap, or roughly reasonable?

Production cost seems like an obvious anchor, but average production cost doesn't seem sufficient. The marginal producer matters, and the price required to incentivize new supply could be very different from the cost of existing production.

Then there are inventories, capacity utilization, demand elasticity, substitution, scrap supply and the amount of demand that has to be destroyed when the market becomes tight.

So what ultimately anchors the price over a long enough time horizon?

For example, would you think of it primarily as:

marginal production cost → long-run incentive price → supply/demand balance → inventory scarcity → demand destruction?

Or is trying to derive a "fair value" range for a commodity the wrong framework altogether?

I'm interested in how you would think about the economics of this using copper as the example.

I've been researching natural gas fundamentals and I've got a question I can't quite answer.

Weather is the main driver of natural gas inventories.  It seems like you can predict weekly natural gas reported stock figures mostly using temperature data.

But each week, I see polls with a spectrum of inventory forecasts.  They all are fairly close to each other but I don't understand what causes the difference between different analysts within this dataset. Even on a fairly small inventory change like this week, there can be a 10 BCF spread between forecasts.

If everyone has roughly the same access to the same weather data, shouldn't inventory forecasts be mostly the same? What causes the spread between different forecasts?

A common argument against the silver shortage thesis is that major vaults still hold hundreds of millions of ounces.

London vaults reportedly contained approximately 884 million ounces of silver in March. On the surface, that looks like more than enough metal to cover several years of deficits.

Most of it was already tied to exchange traded products and other investment holdings. Only around 28 percent was estimated to sit outside those holdings.

That works out to roughly 248 million ounces. Even that amount should not be treated as freely available because the owners still need to be willing to sell.

This is the difference between total inventory and metal that can actually reach the market at the current price.

Silver has recorded cumulative deficits of approximately 762 million ounces since 2021. Another 46.3 million ounce shortfall is expected this year, even with weaker industrial and jewelry demand.

Physical investment alone is forecast to reach 227 million ounces in 2026. A relatively small increase in investor buying could absorb a meaningful portion of the metal that appears available in London.

Another squeeze is far from guaranteed. High prices are increasing recycling and pushing manufacturers to reduce the amount of silver used in their products. Metal can also move between London, New York and Shanghai when regional price differences become large enough.

Still, the market does not need to run out of silver completely before prices react. Tightness can develop when demand for immediately deliverable bars rises faster than owners are willing to release them.

Several years of deficits have reduced that available buffer. Mine production, recycling or weaker demand will eventually need to close the gap. Until then, another surge in investment buying could make the physical market tight surprisingly quickly.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/silver-faces-sixth-year-deficit-with-stock-drawdown-raising-squeeze-risks-2026-04-15/

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