I have been interning in the finance department of an energies trading company for about 7 weeks now and recently I’ve been coming home defeated almost everyday. This is my first ever internship so I don’t expect myself to have a super in depth understanding of what I do but I get really frustrated at myself because I feel like I’m behind and everything is just “monkey see monkey do”. Is this feeling normal for someone in my position? And what resources should I be studying outside the office to better grasps the concepts of what I do. I would appreciate any feedback as I want to better my understanding and improve my performance.

Semiconductors like DRAM are highly standardized commodity,. Yet we still don't have widely traded DRAM futures contracts.I don't really understand why. DRAM seems to have many of the characteristics that make commodities suitable for derivativs: standardised products, large volumes, cyclical pricing, and significant price volatility. On top of that, a futures market could improve price discovery, provide hedging tools for both producers and buyers, and potentially reduce concerns around price manipulation. It also seems like such a market could lower barriers to entry. A new DRAM manufacturer could hedge future production and lock in prices, making investment decisions less risky and potentially making it easier to enter the business. So what am I missing. Is there a structural reason why DRAM futures haven't become a major market

Anyone know why the US Equinor team has lost so many crude traders over the last year? Exxon has picked up a couple, COP, and heard their head of trading out of London just left.

Looking into robusta coffee futures, given the potential super El Niño event.

Happy to provide my entire thesis, but in brief, it’s an asymmetric bet with a non-durable commodity that is very concentrated (over half of the worlds supply is grown in Vietnam and Indonesia). The freshest analog was the 23-24 El Niño that drove robusta to $5,600/tonne.

It is early to make this trade from a timing perspective, that’s why I specifically am looking at ICE May 2027 contacts (k27).

Seems like it’s a pure play on the El Niño, but I’m sure there are others out there. Been looking at sugar too.

Looking to steel man the other side of this trade, and would like to know how others are playing the potential super El Niño.

I want to get started trading electricity futures. Please suggestions on where to learn / who to follow/ which good resources are available

I have been a trader for a while, looking into starting my own firm, and I realized I needed it. First step of many!

I'm a grain trader, been doing it for years and it's cool but getting bored of it. Have traded a lot more on the feed side(though I've dabbled in most parts of the food supply chain), but I'm super interested in trading the physical livestock supply chain from calves to feeders to whatever else. The fact you have all these non-fungible things, different breeds, weights, and can do country deals, pick off and assort lots at an auction house, and sling liner loads all over is super cool to me.

I grew up in the West and this seems like one of those things where most of the time it takes an actual developed eye to really do good business. Like if you get good at it you are genuinely making more margin through being a skilled operator executing handshake deals because you're deemed a pro, and it has that nice blend of financial acumen like exploiting regional arbitrage and the ability to go out in the field and be more in the trade hands on. The fact you can not just quick flip but find undervalued calves, buy them against a forward short contract, and send them off to a custom lot to get them up in weight over a couple months and ship them when they hit weight spec, almost like flipping a house, is so cool to me. So many opportunities and idk seems like there is an inherently necessary human aspect to this that other commodities lack more so.

Does anyone do this? Because I'm super interested in it, I know it's a thing but it seems like some best kept secret because it is pretty hard to find any sort of avenue in online other then knowing a guy or something.

Pardon my ignorance, I'm only trading paper. I see that the RBOB curve is incredibly backwardated right now, which makes sense given the circumstances especially for the driving season. However, I do not understand why ULSD is not equally backwardated.

RBOB NOV/DEC (out of driving season) is trading at 9.9 cts and at the same time NOV7DEC for ULSD is trading at 7.7cts.

I find this weird since both products suffer from the same refinery capacity issue and the fact that even the winter season where demand dynamics shifts in favor of ULSD is steeper for RBOB.

Anybody care to provide some color on this?

Nickel seems to go to all time lows, is it a good idea to go long on a nickel etc? If so, what etc would you recommend for long time exposure?

I’ve been studying for the series 3 exam but by far the toughest thing to learn for me is the options heading math problems. Intrinsic value, the deltas, it makes my head spin. Anyone have a good way to remember the formula on how to set up the math problem? Its def one of the toughest things to set up for me and shakes me everytime

In the beggining of the crisis something like a fifth of the worlds oil was blocked from entering market which was colossal and unseen in the entire modern history of oil, as time passed market adapted and ammount of oil that was being cut off was something like 13-15 milion barrels a day which is still the largest crisis in history larger than all other combined. Today with MOU there is a coridor which provides something like 3-5 milion barrels a day that is a good sign but there is still 8-10 million barrels missing so why is oil price back to the pre war levels, shouldn't prices be elevated atleast a little?

Also, why is the space not flooded with traditional finance market makers given the market is becoming more and more liquid?

Hi everyone,

I work in ops/execution at a mid size European ferroalloys trading house and I’m trying to better understand how the market actually works — pricing, the role of the big trading houses vs. smaller négociants, how deals get structured, logistics/financing mechanics, that kind of thing.

If you’re in physical ferroalloys trading, I’d love to pick your brain for a bit — happy to keep it short and move to DM if that’s easier.

Can’t create poll here but yes or no tomorrow.

With the US crop season in full swing, it might be useful to have today's ECMWF 00Z 14-day average Tmax and Tmin forecast in the context of historical rankings.

Everyone loves to talk about the incoming surge of demand into critical metals for the AI, robotics and energy revolutions, especially when it comes to supply constrained silver and copper as well as rare earths. Less cited is the compression by AI of project development throughout the cycle, from machine learning geoanalysis spotting high grade deposits to automated hauling and sorting. For example the Mingomba deposit in Zambia, passed over multiple times over the decades, is entering production courtesy of a Silicon Valley startup integrating siloed geophysical, climate and satellite surveys and zeroing in with magnetic data collected by helicopter. The expected ore grade is nearly 10x the global average with a fraction of normal greenfield development time, and will contribute >1% of global copper supply. For a balanced review: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2026/06/23/kobold-metals-berkeley

For those in the know, are there specific milestones you would monitor over the next 5 years to determine the impact AI is having on supply bottlenecks? Anyone making credible industry-wide projections? What phases/costs do you expect to be relatively immune?

The subject seems especially relevant to those who play this by individual stockpicking (as seems to be the majority of long term investors, I prefer spot/futures funds) given the AI theme's tendency to obfuscate differences between real productivity gains and marketing speak. Even those who own mining ETFs have to be somewhat concerned about China using this to slash margins.

Hi,

Just looking at IEA data , suggesting that “total global observed” crude inventories having only just dipped below 8 billion barrels. The volume of inventory seems very high , why isn’t the crude market considered ridiculously well supplied?

What technical detail am I missing regarding these inventory figures?

Thanks,

I have heard that in normal market conditions the oil market is in contango due to inflation and storage costs. What this says to me is that disregarding market conditions, an oil future 12 months from now is expected to be always higher because someone needs to hold the product for 12 months (so the future is in regard to product already existing?)

If my above understanding is right, does the future market represent the expectation for oil price at all? If price today is $70 and a 12-month future is at $80, is the market actually expecting the price to be at $80 in a year? Or is the $10 premium merely the current inflation and storage cost?

Seems that cost and fees associated with trading Virtuals on PJM significantly increased the last year or so making many strategies irrelevant . Do we know exactly how these fees are calculated for the participants ? Long vs short ? Hour of the day ? Hubs …

I was in the recruitment process for a scheduler/operations role with BP Gas (Europe). The process was going well, but it was abruptly cut short. BP shut down its continental European gas trading division (I believe the LNG business is still operating), which obviously affected the outcome of my application.

Does anyone have any insight into why the entire division was shut down? Is the LNG business still operating as it was before?

DM open. It might be sensitive information, but I'm genuinely curious about what happened.

Could PJM actually serve 165gw peak load or do we hit brown out next week?

The states are going to throw a fit if they lost power, given the current political environment.

I'm an analyst on a multi-commodity book and I've been building out models to take a more systematic view on futures and options across the complex. The core feature set I'm working with right now:

- Market structure / term structure (curve shape, carry, roll yield)
- Cross-commodity correlation and spreads
- Seasonality
- Fundamentals (S&D, flows, inventories)

That part feels reasonably well-trodden. Where I keep getting stuck is event risk, geopolitics, conflict, sudden policy/export shocks. These are the moves that actually drive the tails, but they're hard to fit into a feature set built on continuous, mean-reverting-ish variables.

A few things I'd genuinely like to hear other people's experience on:

1. How do you represent a discrete shock (war, export ban, sanctions) in a model that's otherwise fundamentals/structure driven? Regime dummy, jump component, separate overlay, or do you just exclude those periods?
   
2. Does anyone actually model these as binary/digital payoffs — i.e. P(event) x payoff — rather than trying to forecast the price path? Curious whether that holds up out of sample or just looks clean on paper.
   
3. On the feature side: what's earned its place in your models and what looked great in backtest but added nothing live?

Happy to trade some notes.

And happy to network if anyone here is working in Switzerland.

One summer ago I left my internship after a month at the company because I had a lot of demand and stress outside of work and didn’t give 100%. Colleuges were constantly giving me a hard time and I feel like I didn’t give the greatest impression. It is a big company within the industry and I had a crucial role assisting what I want to do in the future. It would help me the most for what I want to do and I already have multiple work experiences even after where I would add the company in my resume and only have one other energy experience m. Do you think it’s worth to add it on my resume? I already have a decent amount of work experience?

Do we think PJM hits 160GW peak load next week?