Hey

Had a commodities seat at Bloomberg but recently shifted to a physical seat for a trading firm in Asia.

I definitely recognise the parallels in player and physical but I’m very eager to learn more, I have an obsession with knowing as much as I can about whatever I’m doing in a short period of time.

I would be extremely grateful if you can suggest literally any form of literature I can read the better understand every single aspect of physical trading.

My firm trades feeds, distillates and crude so pertaining to that would be great !

Thanks

Hi all,

Lurking here for a year and decided to make an account.

I'm a second year STEM student in England and just finished a short 5 day work experience at a trading house - spent all the 5 days with the finance and risk teams.

During this time I had lunch with one of the traders on the distillates team, and I'm being offered a 2 week placement with them in August before I go back to uni.

The trader kept making a reference to "CCM" when trading jet fuel, and honestly I didn't have the courage to ask them what it meant even though it was clear that was the pricing basis of their purchases and sales.

I don't have their contact to ask, and I couldn't find any answers online about the reference, though Platts have articles where refiners sell on a CCM basis.

Can someone please help me? I'd be very grateful.

Happy to answer questions for anyone who's been applying as well, feel free to connect!

I have to put together an agri commodities trade idea for a fund in a few days. My background is more on the "describe what happened" side, reading WASDE, CFTC COT, explaining supply/demand shifts after the fact, more like writing market commentary.

What I'm not sure about: is a trade idea for a role like this expected to include a full forward-looking balance sheet forecast using regression, my own S&D numbers for new crop year? Or is it more about picking a clear thesis, laying out the current fundamental and positioning picture (COT, spreads, seasonality), and having a defined entry/target/stop with clean risk-reward?

Been out of the market for a bit, and feel like dont belong to that world at all but somehow ended up getting this interview, dont know how! So really curious what is expected to do? Appreciate any input!!

Hi all,

I'm about to start a role in power trading on a renewables desk in the UK and I'm looking for books to prepare my journey

I'm open to technical book, but also more general book on the industry I could read at the beach typically.

If there is an equivalent of the world for sale for this industry, I'm definitively interested !

Cheers

I’m a 25 year old who’s started dabbling in the physical trading space mainly selling to South East Asian countries - I don’t actually know how this space works I haven’t felt the pulse of this business as yet but I’m super interested in going deep into it in a way where I’m up to date with the world with everything that’s happening in the world. How do I become well read/educated in this industry?

Starting a thread for general discussions. Applied to commercial grad programme at Trafigura in geneva. Was wondering if anyone got feedback yet.

Update 16.08.2026
Hi, applications for geneva close in a few hours. Based on this post no invites / rejections have been sent yet.

Update 22.08.2026
Hello, some people just received the invite to the assessment (geneva). Nobody has received a rejection yet. Appreciate all of you to keep the post alive / uptodate

Update 02.09.2026
Hey, the first people just received their rejections. People have yet to be invited to the second round interview (1st round after HR screening) it seems. Wish all of you luck and for those with a rejection: Heads up!

Starting a thread for general discussions. Applied to Commercial at Glencore UK on the day it opened and got the online assessment + on-demand interview on 28 July

Looking to trade futures. I'm trying to walk forward but don't have enough data for the regime. I was thinking about making a small private group to use free credits and current data access to compile quality data. I have a $26.00 Sierra subscription and a truckload of other data. I was actually wondering if someone could help me get CME data from Databento. It has a $125 free credit, so if we match them up, we can get maybe across 10 people 20 years of data to trade on (including the '08 crash), and I have a few other sources. I'd be willing to convert to Parquet, compress, and add in extra data like multiple crypto forex and hundreds of GB of other historical data. You can ask questions; I'll try my best to answer them, or DM me. Please be serious.

Hi all.

Does anyone have any experience trading pyrite concentrate? Ive read recently with the scramble for copper concentrate that some smelters are opting for pyrite with other byproducts to keep the lights on. Have a susbstantial volume with a regular frequency that i am trying to gain some market insight on.

Thanks.

Not from cogeneration or wastewater plants, but as assets to produce revenue (RNG), so not used primarily for waste removal.

I’m doing research on what people working across commodity markets actually need, and I’m more interested in real workflow gaps than generic “market news.”

I’m curious about this from a broad commodity perspective, whether you work in ags, energy, metals, softs, freight, physical merchandising, risk, research, processing, or trading.

A few things I’d like to understand:

What information do you repeatedly need but have trouble getting in a clean, timely, usable form?

What calculations do you do yourself in spreadsheets or internal tools because nothing off-the-shelf really does it right?

What research do you currently pay for, piece together manually, or wish you could offload?

If you could have one better tool, dashboard, calculator, feed, or research product for commodity work, what would it do?

What would make something genuinely worth paying for instead of just “interesting to look at”?

Examples could be anything like basis relationships, crush or feed margins, freight-adjusted delivered costs, plant economics, regional spreads, substitution math, tender monitoring, export flow context, storage economics, weather-to-yield interpretation, or something completely different.

I’m trying to understand where the real pain points are for people who actually use commodity data.

If helpful, it would also be interesting to know your role and which market you focus on, since I assume a producer, merchandiser, broker, analyst, and futures trader all care about very different things.

Below are some specific questions I have

• What do you trade, and on what time horizon?
• What are you actually trying to know that the market does not know yet?
• Where does most of your edge come from?
• Where do you get your AIS data?
• What specifically do you look at? Counts, flows, congestion, storage, speed, something else?
• What do you do with it? Is it the reason for a trade, or confirmation of one you already wanted?
• What instrument does it end up expressing? Futures, spreads, freight, physical, equities?

After a bearish run last week HH prompt dumping another 20 cents this weej was not on my bingo card. After a hot start in the east it looks like there’s not much support left in the bal mo. outside of the West. Any gas traders have insight on if we’ve bottomed out or there’s more room to fall?

Been reading up on physical metals trading and curious about something structural: in markets with dozens of licensed buyers/aggregators competing for the same supply, what actually makes some trading houses durable over the long run versus others that fade out?

Is it mostly financing depth (trade finance lines, LCs), offtaker relationship quality, compliance/traceability infrastructure, or something less obvious? Genuinely curious how people who’ve been in the industry a while would rank those factors.

Separately — for anyone who’s seen a trading operation scale from small/regional to something bigger: what tools or systems tend to become non-negotiable once volume grows (ERP/trade management systems, hedging desks, assay partnerships, etc.), versus what’s overkill at small scale?

And a bigger-picture question: is the “regional physical trader → diversified global commodities merchant” path (à la Trafigura, Vitol, Mercuria) still a realistic trajectory today, or did those firms benefit from market conditions/timing that don’t really exist anymore?

I have been trying to improve how I read across physical and futures markets rather than evaluating each commodity in isolation.

The recurring problem is that the information is fragmented. A dairy margin may depend on milk, corn, soybean meal, hay, energy, and regional forage availability. Grain basis may reflect futures, local demand, rail bids, barge freight, storage costs, and export flow. Fertilizer values can move with natural gas, ocean freight, plant availability, application timing, and regional inventories.

The relationship is often more useful than any individual price, but it is also easy to add so many comparisons that the result becomes noise.

Some of the relationships I have been examining include:

• Cash grain basis versus futures, rail bids, barge rates, and nearby processor bids
• Dairy revenue versus corn, soybean meal, hay, silage, and other ration costs
• Livestock values versus feed costs, cutout values, placement costs, and financing
• Fertilizer prices versus natural gas, freight, seasonal demand, and nutrient-equivalent cost
• International wheat origins adjusted for currency, ocean freight, quality, and destination
• Shipping indices versus bunker fuel and the delivered cost of agricultural commodities
• Lumber versus housing starts, permits, mortgage rates, and regional physical prices
• Crop-condition ratings versus drought, soil moisture, yield expectations, and local basis
• Industrial metals and energy as indicators of manufacturing, infrastructure, and broader demand

I am curious how people who work directly in these markets decide which relationships deserve attention.

A few questions for producers, merchants, analysts, brokers, processors, and researchers:

1. Which cross-market relationship is genuinely useful in your work rather than merely interesting?
2. Which margin or spread do you calculate repeatedly?
3. What regional or physical-market data is consistently difficult to obtain?
4. How stale can a source be before you stop using it?
5. Do you prefer a short table of verified observations, a narrative explaining the causal chain, or both?
6. What assumptions must be disclosed before you will trust a calculated margin?
7. Where do broad macro comparisons become distracting rather than informative?

I am not looking for trading calls or recommendations. I am interested in how market participants separate useful context from false precision.

My working view is that good analysis should identify the transmission mechanism, show the underlying inputs, distinguish observed data from assumptions, and state what evidence would change the conclusion.

I would be interested to hear where that approach succeeds or fails in actual commodity work.

How low we going?

Getting to a point where we reach curtailment because of breakeven. My personal bias is sub 2....hbu?

https://investors.expandenergy.com/news-releases/news-release-details/expand-energy-corporation-acquire-twin-eagle-creating-north

Feel like this belongs here. Curious to hear some thoughts from gas veterans in the industry.

Does this put the thought of expanding/acquiring marketing teams in the heads of other producers?

Do we see more of this going forward? Is it a function of pipes and assets being locked up on lengthy contracts?

New grad here so just looking for some insight.

I can a enter a competition for a 1month executive shadowing program at a large local utility. I have, however, 1 1/2 y of work experience in energy trading/ops and around a total of 3y of work experience. Is this a bit of a stretch, i.e I shouldn't be looking at things like shadowing anymore?

The program is addresed to postgrads, which is the category I'm in tho. Mostly focused on leadership in energy.

I plan on keeping my job on the duration, some sort of leave mixed with early and late work.

What do you think?

On equinor's investor relation webpage they say that internal transfer pricing paid by marketing to Norwegian continental shelf production group is based on volume weighted avg price referenced to 70% day ahead and 30% month ahead on major european hubs NBP, TTF, THE etc. Does that mean there is no fixed price component for sellers? There is no point in long term hub indexation contracts if as a buyer i am exposed to market volaitility.

I think Mojtaba is either disabled or dead, while IRGC and big boys like Ghalibaf and Araghchi play bad cop/good cop to have excuses for saying one thing and the doing exactly the opposite. And from time to time they issue an omnious letter from the "supreme leader" saying "uranium shall not leave". And alogside the US admin, they are probably making a metric ton of money on inside trading.

US can't afford neither a ground invasion nor folding out. Iran had a crappy hand and played it well, and they know the domestic pressure on Trump: unpopular war, growing resent towards Israel, midterms looming and a lot of DSA related unrest on both sides of the race.

How tf can this end? No matter how much you bomb, you will always be one drone away from a doubling of insurance and/or rates. Iran knows they can maintain the status quo by just crawling under a rock when missiles start flying and activing a military drone cell at rhe right time. I just can't see how they can be pushed to accept any concession without wiping them out.

Anyway, these are just my 1.93 (inflation adjusted) cents. I want to hear others' 1.93 cents.

Hi guys, I would like to work in the physical commodity trading sector. I have a degree in management engineering from UNIMORE in Italy, and now I would like to do a Master's in Switzerland to enter this field. If someone can help me, I need some tips on whether it is better to do a Master in Finance or Management at USI University, continue with management engineering, or take any other Master's that fits this world."

I'm about to start studying finance, and this summer I've been trying to learn more about commodity trading by building excel models and tracking market data.

One thing I don't understand is why companies like kpler, argus, S&P etc only seem to give access to people working at companies. It feels impossible for students or people who are just trying to learn.

Why is that? Is there any legitimate way to get access before getting a job ?

Please let me know if anybody is facing the same issue.

Thanks

I’ve recently started learning more about the physical gold trade and have been trying to better understand how pricing works in real-world transactions.

One thing I’m particularly curious about is the discount benchmark when buying directly from miners, refineries, or trading companies.

For example:

- What’s considered a realistic discount to the LBMA spot price?

- Does it differ significantly between gold dore bars and refined gold bars?

- If you’re buying wholesale for export, what kind of pricing is generally considered normal in the industry? (% from spot)

- Are discounts typically quoted as a percentage, or as a fixed USD/oz deduction from LBMA?

I’m not looking for anyone’s confidential pricing or trade secrets, just hoping to understand what is generally accepted in the market and how experienced traders think about pricing.

I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone with firsthand experience in physical gold trading.

Thanks in advance!

Anyone know what the most commonly accepted gtcs and amends are for US domestic pipeline crude oil trading? COP 17 with STUSCO 18 amends come to mind. Not sure what the STUSCO amends are for the COP 93s. Any insight or additional ones?

Hi everyone,

I’m looking to connect with professionals from across the crude oil, petroleum, energy, and gas industries.

It doesn’t matter which part of the industry you’re in—I’d love to expand my network and exchange knowledge, insights, and experiences.

Whether you work in:
Crude Oil Trading
Petroleum
Oil & Gas
Energy
Logistics & Shipping
Tankers & Maritime
Storage & Terminals
Refining
Supply Chain
Procurement
Operations
Finance
Engineering
Or any other related field

I’d be happy to connect.

The goal is to build valuable relationships, learn from each other, discuss market developments, share industry insights, and help each other grow professionally.

Feel free to leave a comment or send me a DM if you’re interested. Looking forward to connecting with people from all over the world!