Finding independent physical oil traders/trading houses

I read your job description. It's not going to work. I've seen large O&G trading firms try and set up a purely prop physical trading shop with no assets in a specific geographic region and they got crushed. You need assets (whether it's owning or leasing) to make this work long term. Why not just a hire a financial trader?

If you really want a physical guy, you will also need a scheduler. Prop physical trading is so much harder if you don't have physical assets and you are going up against some stiff competition from banks, producers, refiners, and midstream companies who many of them have prop trading. When you get into this space you don't deploy an initial small amount of capital, you go big or you go home. Strategically it doesn't make sense to do it on the small scale unless that is your niche ie: trucking crude from various small producers, aggregating volumes and selling that to market. This might be a term agreement then, but again, you need to have access to trucks, you won't have ratable production from small producers so you constantly have to worry about being too long or too short and if you dont' have access to storage you will be at the mercy of the market. Just a bad idea for some family office to go into physical oil unless they have expertise etc. Terrible idea for a trader to go to a family office unless they give him x millions to basically set up his own trading business where he will be able to negotiate tank leases, pipeline space, etc.