Wannabe Physical Trader Deciding Between Two Internships

Hi all, I'm a Freshman at a well known Ag School in California. I hope to one day become a physical commodity trader. After quite a few cold calls I've lined up two internships for the summer. One with a freight forwarder (NVOCC) who does some work with Ag products but mostly ships manufactured goods. They do about 120 million in business a year but are still relatively small. The other is with one of INTL FCStone's Ag derivatives brokerage/hedging groups. In both cases the internships are part of a multi year series with the expectation of me coming to work there full time. Obviously, after this summer I'm not locked into that and am totally free to intern for a different company.

I wouldn't get direct exposure to physicals in either internship but which do you believe is the better option? Any advice in general is also appreciated.

Thank you all in advance.

8 Comments
 
Best Response

Purely on brand name INTL FCStone - as I have not heard of NVOCC (disclaimer, I am not U.S based - so my view is skewed, but it still implies the former is more of a global name).

Then use the base commodities knowledge learnt there to leverage an internship at a physical shop.

 

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate the global perspective.

Just to clarify, a NVOCC is a non vessel operating common carrier. It's just a sub classification of freight forwarders in the United States. They basically are a shipping company that owns no ships and instead buy a certain amount of container space on ships every year at a discounted rate which they then broker to their clients. I didn't want to use the companies actual name for privacy reasons.

 

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