Phillips 66 Commercial Intern

They're doing OCR at my school and it seems like a commodity market risk/trading internship. Can anyone shed some light on the program/the company's trading business? Can't seem to find much online.

 

Phillips as a stand-alone entity is relatively recent (maybe three years?). They are the result of the downstream spin-off of ConocoPhillips so they mostly trade crude and products as well as NGLs. Mostly (if not entirely) refinery/asset optimization, wouldn't guess that they would be doing a ton of spec. Great place to learn if you want to get into the icky-sticky (crude, products, logistics, assets, etc). Tons of North American assets, sprinkle in a few international ones too.

Again, my understanding, please correct me if I'm off base.

 
Best Response

The commercial intern program is their trade floor internship program. The work can be compared to what you'd find yourself doing as an intern on Shell or BP's trade floors but the prestige and culture are significantly different. From what I've heard, interns are placed into scheduling, market analysis, or risk groups so they interact with traders although not directly all day. It's great exposure to commodity trading environments and should be a strong internship for full time commodity trading recruitment positioning. The experience is hugely dependent on what group you're placed in and who your manager is. In general, P66 is a major energy trader but their activities are focused around supply trading and they're more risk adverse than Shell or BP (and trading houses of course).

 
Lerg:

The commercial intern program is their trade floor internship program. The work can be compared to what you'd find yourself doing as an intern on Shell or BP's trade floors but the prestige and culture are significantly different.
From what I've heard, interns are placed into scheduling, market analysis, or risk groups so they interact with traders although not directly all day.
It's great exposure to commodity trading environments and should be a strong internship for full time commodity trading recruitment positioning.
The experience is hugely dependent on what group you're placed in and who your manager is.
In general, P66 is a major energy trader but their activities are focused around supply trading and they're more risk adverse than Shell or BP (and trading houses of course).

I hope to be starting in the P66 program next summer. When you speak of "prestige" between P66/BP&Shell, which would you say are more prestigious?

 

From what I've seen, it's about how much discretionary trading versus how much supply trading the traders are allowed to do. For example, a trader at P66 might have a great idea for a trade but if he's primarily a supply trader then his risk limits will be lower and he won't be allowed to take on as big of a position as he might have liked. At places that are more oriented towards trading, the traders are allowed to take bigger swings. I also wouldn't bucket Trafi and bp together. At bp many traders still have to be focused on moving production and securing supply for BP's wells, refineries, and distribution centers. At trafi, (I don't actually know anyone there so this is speculation) I imagine that they're looking for money making opportunities all the time and don't spend as much time focusing on the needs of their physical assets.

 

Oh, sorry, I misread your post and thought you wanted differences b/t supply and discretionary trading.

As for culture, more discretionary trading tends to correlate with a faster paced, more competitive environment. Trade floors focused on supply trading can feel much more like a corporation's operations office and less like the stereotypical bank trading floor environment. But culture is hugely dependent on the office and the bench. Generalizing only goes so far.

 

totally agree with Goodbread. Prestige was a poorly chosen word in my post above and it's not what people are interested in this industry. If you're managing offtake or supply for a physical asset at some tiny company in the gulf that would wind up being more valuable experience for commodity trading than being a pricing analyst at a major trader.

 

Great program if you want a solid grounding in physical trading and asset optimization. They take care in training their new hires to get them the requisite knowledge to succeed in the roles that they will rotate through. It can be a long road to becoming a trader, but you'll learn more about the physical movement of energy than in most other trading shops.

 

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