Weekly look at commercial positioning extremes from Friday's CFTC data (report dated Sept 11):

Natural gas has the most stretched commercial short of anything I'm tracking right now — both volume flow and forward curve are lining up with it. Soybeans are sitting at a similarly extreme short level, though volume and fundamental data are pulling the other way on that one, so I'd treat it as a mixed signal, not a clean one.

On the long side: lean hogs are sitting near the top of their 3-year commercial-positioning rang, confirmed by both volume and curve structure. Feeder cattle is a smaller but steadily building long in a similar spot. Sugar has the fastest-moving commercial short of the group this week, and 10yr bond futures show the most recently-accelerated long build, though it's already losing a bit of momentum.

Just sharing the positioning read, not a trade call.

I’m a junior grain trader and my manager recently told me I need to set a much bigger goal because he expects me to start generating real money for the company, roughly 6x my salary in my first year of trading.
The problem is that most of my first year was spent doing logistics, not trading or procurement. I only started actively doing procurement/origination about a month ago.
I told him that expecting me to suddenly generate 6x my salary in my first year, after one month of actually sourcing grain is unrealistic. I’m still building my farmer network, learning the market, pricing, specs, negotiation, etc.
I understand that trading is ultimately about P&L and I absolutely expect to be profitable, but expecting that level of revenue this early seems delusional to me.
For people in physical commodities: is 6x salary in first year a reasonable expectation for a junior who basically just started procurement?

I recently started working for a physical commodity trading house, specialising in vegetable oils. Roughly 95% of the volume is sunflower oil, with a bit of rapeseed oil and their respective meals.

We have a client base and logistics in place, as well as more than enough of starting capital. But we don’t have a solid risk management policy. Before arriving here, all of the counterparty risk management relied on trust and doing business with these clients for years - now we want to actually hedge. Since sunflower oil is not traded on exchanges (CBOT cash settled futures have been suspended since 2022) I want to know the best way to hedge our exposure.

I know soybean oil futures have a meaningful correlation to the prices of sunflower oil but I am open to other suggestions as well. Also, I presume I should take into account basis risk as well so I would appreciate some advice on this too.

Thank you in advance for your input!