Best Majors Besides BP/Shell For Oil Trading
Does anyone have direct experience with oil and products trading at the majors besides BP and Shell?
Thinking of firms like Total, Eni, Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, P66, Valero, Marathon, Suncor, Koch. How much of what they do is to buy and sell their own barrels and optimize their own assets. Vs how much are they sourcing from 3rd parties and aggressively spec trading?
Any one of the bunch preferable to the others and have alumni spread across trade shops and hedge funds?
P66 has a graduate trading programme in London, same for Total in Geneva. Your list should also include Aramco’s trading arm, which was setup by former Glencore traders. And forget about Exxon, they are too risk averse and are an impossible bureaucracy for traders to thrive in (neglecting their declining work environment and outflow of employees not stuck for their golden retirements).
I would say Total, P66 and Suncor all trade as aggressive as Shell for instance. Koch is also very aggressive in certain markets.
Do you think the pnl for those companies is comparable to Shell’s? If not gross then on a per person basis? Are they equally as good places to work for a trader?
Tough one to answer, Shell has a very wide band of potential payout. Many Total and Suncor traders make more than Shell traders but Shell has a massive global platform so if you do well they just keep moving you up, plus they have a lot more pre-exec roles.
Are you referencing the pnl individual traders generate or their compensation?
Good point glossed over the first question, was more talking about compensation and vast majority of compensation at these shops is based on deferred amounts (which use a multiplier).
Could you provide some more colour on this? Currently FO at an oil major and comp. for traders is very hush hush...not one of the % PnL shops like BP where the number might be more transparent.
Most pyramid schemes are usually hush hush...
Salary: Very typical to working at a Unilver or Microsoft. As it is a grid, your job grade and then years of experience. Traders usually have higher job grades in the whole organization as they need to maintain some level of base salary. Very common for a new cash/lease/junior trader in these firms to be paid the lower band vs someone who is doing a similar job and did 10 years before in scheduling/marketing/etc...
Potential: As most of these firms come from "European F500" firms it is very common to have an "expected potential" ranking after 2 years into your career this sort of says how fast you should move towards an executive role or why you should get more deferred bonus to be retained. Not sure how all firms administer it today, but with all bonus payouts being discretionary it matters.
Bonus: Essentially all bonuses are discretionary and you are ranked from top to the bottom and desk heads will usually all be marked near the top and seniors from there. I have seen rare cases where a sr trader got paid more than a desk head but that is really cause of the "potential rankings" while like at a BB it is much more common. So if senoirs/desk-heads are the bulk of the people at the top of the list, a lot of their comp will be "deferred", pretty common to get 40% cash only. Deferrals can range from 1-3 years, and most deferrals will come with the ability to get 200% of that bonus amount in 2-3 years. So think of a very good senoir trader who every year gets "deferred" and then cause of the potential they get "extra share options" vs other traders. You start to get a lot of deferred comp.
So name of the game is to rise towards the top fast as possible, collect deferrals and build loyal people around you and below you (gotta hold onto your spot once near the top).
Magnam ut quas saepe. Molestias optio modi est. Aperiam iusto ratione eos enim.
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