internships as a student looking at a career in commodity trading
hello everyone, i made some posts before about this topic but wanted to go more in depth. I know a lot of people on this forum are in the commodities trading world, so my question is what internships do i get? Lots of internships for commodities trading seems to be graduate programs and stuff like that, not accessible for a underclassmen college student. So, what internships can i get? I’ve been trying to find commodities brokerages and hedge funds that i can attempt to cold email, but it’s hard to find them. Does anyone in the industry know of some commodities brokerages or commodities hedge funds? I’d love to get my foot through the door as early as possible and to figure out what i want to trade, so any insights would be appreciated and a list of commodities hedge funds and brokerages would be too.
Thanks
There aren’t a lot of commodities hedge funds still around, the ones that are tend to be lean, and they don’t want inexperienced people going there to learn for a summer. Sorry, that’s just the state of that sector.
What I recommend is that you just find some other finance internships. Just get a BB summer analyst role, a prop trading/not commodities specific hedge fund internship, or something else that tells a future employer that signal that you have potential. It will stand out a lot come time for graduate program hiring if you really prefer commodities.
Go to your local utility (gas, water, power)
Corporates (airlines, truck stops)
Green corporates (amazon, google)
Solar companies
Farming co-ops
Barge companies
List of a bunch of brokers -> https://www.cmegroup.com/tools-information/find-a-broker.html
Do BP sophomore experience. I know one guy who interned at Glencore while in his undergrad but he was only able to do so through aggressive networking. I think hitting up some brokers would be a good place to start. Once you get your foot in the door and can put something on a resume a lot more things will open up. Definitely keep networking and start a commodities club if your school doesn't have one.
Sounds like you're in europe, their basically free university in most countries encourages people to stay in school forever so you are constantly competing against students in post-grad studies. If you're in the US you just need to look harder and don't look for "trading" internships. In ags there's a ton of merchandising internships at ABCD along with smaller companies like CGB, Scoular, co-ops, etc. As DOUG mentioned, lots of utilities and at the major energy groups have internships for trading, some of them might be called power marketing internships I got an offer awhile back for large energy trading under that title. Metals, not much to say but I've seen mining groups have mkt analytics internships. From there you got companies like CME, Platts, IHS Markit, etc having commodity market facing roles. You can go for logistics groups doing freight pricing under pricing/logistics analyst/mkt analyst internship titles. There's just gobs of these internships out there so it's on you for not finding enough roles to apply to. Go forth and apply young man!
I am in america, and put in some applications / emails to commodity brokerages so far. Will look into ags as well like you said. For utilities, what are some big ones with a trading presence? It was hard finding things on my local utility provider. I was also interested in looking into bulk carrier shipping firms or some other logistics.
Look who has a FERC license.
Look who is a member of ISOs
Trust me, there are hundreds
tons of major utilities with a merchant trading presence.
Exelon, Xcel Energy, Direct Energy, DTE Energy, EDF Trading , Entergy, Con Ed, Consumer’s Energy, PG&E, SoCal Gas, Nextera Energy, etc.
You can easily find an internship in a port, like agency stuff, thats good field experience
sorry could you elaborate what you meant by that? I did email 1 or so dry bulk shipping companies in their operations departments, making sure ships get were they need to on time, ect.
Shipping companies usually hire people with some port/sea experience that's why I said you could get an internship in a shipping/port agency (a ship agent acts as a representative of owners/charterers)
Wilhemlsen (big name in the industry) has many agencies in the US
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