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Commodity Trading and Alternative Investment Guru Stays Flexible

WSO Podcast

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Member @Commodity101 shares his overarching career mantra.

We cover how he broke into a bulge bracket trading desk in energy and natural gas, why he jumped to a physical trading commodity shop after 2 years, his pivot to a $40bn alternative investment fund and why he then spent 3 years at a non-profit in the certification space.

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Check out @Commodity101's Q&A here.

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WSO Podcast Transcript:

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:00:06] Hello and welcome. I'm Patrick Curtis, your host and chief Monkey. And this is the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Join me as I talk to some of the community's most successful and inspirational members to gain valuable insight into different career paths and life in general. Let's get to it. In this episode, member Commodity 101 shares his overarching career mantra. We cover how he broke into a bulge bracket trading desk in energy and natural gas, why he jumped to a physical trading commodity shop after two years. His pivot to a $40 Billion alternative investment fund, and why he then spent three years at a nonprofit in the certification space where he is now and what's in store next. Enjoy.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:00:59] Commodity 101. Thanks so much for joining the Wall Street Voices podcast.

@Commodity101: [00:01:05] Thanks for having me, Patrick.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:01:06] It would be great if you could give the listeners just a quick summary of your background.

@Commodity101: [00:01:11] Sure. So my background is essentially across different energy commodity markets. Crude oil, natural gas, NGLs, natural gas, liquids, power, coal emissions, LNG, renewables, you name it. As well, coming from a physical and financial background experience, both large bulge bracket commodity shops as well as a top three physical trading shop, as well as a very large investment management firm. More on the financial side for Multiasset alternative investments and now most recently with a geospatial satellite radar technology company named Ursa, that we're sort of leveraging a lot of cutting edge technology for sort of macroeconomic and sort of micro oil and gas insights on a global basis that we're traditionally pretty opaque in these markets. But now, given the technological advances, we're kind of changing the game a bit here.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:02:14] So rewinding sounds like you have a lot of experience going back to university, kind of what did you know? This is kind of what you're interested in doing more, the kind of going after the trading type side of things or kind of how did you fall into that?

@Commodity101: [00:02:28] So I joined joined the very top bulge bracket commodities commodity shop. Right after undergrad I went to a small business school undergrad business focused a double major in economics finance with sort of a global business background and a psychology minor psychology minor in particular. A fun little anecdote I wouldn't diminish there because just understanding people's motivations and how they think what drives them is actually been quite powerful in this industry. In this business. Just a little sidebar there, but I actually didn't find commodities. Commodities found me. I joined a general analyst program and once training was done, particular business unit picks you and I was the only one from our analyst class to be chosen by the commodities business unit and the rest is history. Nine years later, I haven't looked back. It's a really, really interesting market. The incredible volatility keeps it very interesting. There's never a dull day, honestly. And with all the macro geopolitics, you name it, that are constantly keeping everyone on their toes, it's definitely a very interesting business to be in.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:03:42] Can you tell me a little bit about when you kind of when you were kind of interviewing for those positions at the Bulge Bracket Bank was it sounds like it was more a generalist pool. Did you go through the typical summer analyst program? And then at the end of the summer, they kind of the commodities group kind of said, Hey, we want you to join, or how did that work?

@Commodity101: [00:04:00] No, I hadn't done an internship with them. This was full time positions that we were interviewing for as a senior in undergrad.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:04:08] And was that pretty rare to get? I mean, is that pretty rare to not have the internship? And then I mean, at least nowadays I think it is. But back then was it.

@Commodity101: [00:04:16] I'd say probably, yes. This was 2010 coming after the recession. It wasn't the easiest thing to do. But I think between sort of the well-rounded experience from the sort of the double major between economics, finance and coming from a global perspective, I had tried to position myself well between internships. I'd done five of them in undergrad and studied abroad twice between London and Australia, done various different internships, once at the Cannes Film Festival actually in France, learning sort of the business side of filmmaking.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:04:50] You had an interesting story, you had an.

@Commodity101: [00:04:52] Interesting related.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:04:53] Ones as well. You had the type of resume resume, it sounds like, where they would pick it up and was like, I want to talk to this guy because he's interesting, because you're abroad, you're everywhere. You're like you said, you had those different internships. It kind of did you feel like you were running a risk because he might be thought of as scattered? Or do you feel like it didn't really matter because he was undergrad like you had?

@Commodity101: [00:05:12] No, I think I did it by design. I wanted to try as many different internships that could to see what I what did I like, what did I not like? And that was actually very, very useful. I'd done some financial planning, done some sort of consulting, whole slew of different roles, and I think it really helped me pinpoint the investing space. The trading world was, was one that I wanted to at least try and break into. Admittedly, it was easier said than done in the 2020 ten timeframe, but, you know, hard work and sort of, well, groundedness and just the power of things like WSO and LinkedIn and reaching out to folks completely cold and saying, I'd love to learn more about your background.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:05:54] Is that how.

@Commodity101: [00:05:55] You think that can be understated?

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:05:56] Is that how you ended up getting that first job out undergrad? Like just, you know.

@Commodity101: [00:06:00] Honestly just picked a lot of people's brains and tried to find out what what good books to read and different resources that were out there. And just these are some relationships that I've just kept as sort of friendly as in the networking side. I think networking is extraordinarily valuable. Obviously, at the end of the day and building that Rolodex also something that.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:06:20] But is there like one continue.

@Commodity101: [00:06:21] To do in your.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:06:22] Business? Is there like one specific relationship that you felt like ended up kind of turning the corner? It was the reason you got that job? Or was it more just like a group of people that got you in the door and then you interviewed? Well.

@Commodity101: [00:06:33] Honestly, no. I think it was just the resume resonating with the hiring manager at the time who was on campus and going through various rounds and just kind of building building the case for for your value. And that was really it. There was no after admittedly none of the sort of LinkedIn messaging and networking didn't necessarily lead to this job. It was purely sort of anecdotal, just picking folks brain, a lot of folks in the industry and sort of competitors at different companies and learning.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:07:05] Do you feel like that made.

@Commodity101: [00:07:06] You look.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:07:06] Like did you feel like that made you smarter in the interviews or that helped at least for that that portion?

@Commodity101: [00:07:11] I do think so. I do think so. Just getting a more realistic picture, you know, you can be kind of green in undergrad and not necessarily know it looks like the industry is X, but really it's more like why? And then kind of getting a more realistic picture of what you're getting yourself into and how to best prep for it for sure.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:07:28] So you get the job.

@Commodity101: [00:07:29] Probably the main value there.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:07:30] You get the job. It's a really tough economy. Amazing. That's incredible. You've even got a job and then especially in this sector. And so you get it on the trading desk and you're saying, okay, we're we're valuing commodities. How do you even begin to know how to do that? Is there training? Is there what's I guess you were there for almost three, two and one half years or so. How long do you feel like it took you to kind of ramp up and what were you doing at the beginning versus what you were doing at the end? Could you give a little perspective on that?

@Commodity101: [00:07:59] Sure. I can give you a quick anecdote. I my first week with the Commodities Business Unit. Ah MDU, we did weekly, weekly team meetings where we kind of rotated and I was up four days on the job and said, All right, well teach us about gas based markets in the Northeast. I knew nothing about commodities but, you know, sink or swim moment and you don't want to sink, so you do what you got to do.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:08:25] Did you know that was coming? Did you know that was coming? I'm sorry. You knew that was coming? I assume before they just put you on the spot.

@Commodity101: [00:08:32] I found I found it out on day one and three days later I had to do it.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:08:36] Oh, my gosh. Wow. Okay, Sink or swim.

@Commodity101: [00:08:39] You've just got to be a sponge. Honestly, one of the biggest pieces of advice I'd give people is. Is be a sponge. Ask a lot of questions, especially early on. No one's going to look at you and say, that's a dumb question ten years into your career, maybe. But at that point, just ask as many questions. Ask what are good books to read? What are the best resources out there and take initiative. Nothing's going to just fall in your lap, and that's another one. I'm sure everyone in your community is driven and motivated and wants to succeed, but hard work, it's palatable. You can find it all over the place, but somebody who really kind of lives and breathes it on the job, it's.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:09:16] Can you give me can you give.

@Commodity101: [00:09:17] Me a way to differentiate yourself? At the end.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:09:19] Of the day, can you give me a little sense of like what you actually did day to day? Like what was the bulk of your work? Because I don't you know, I was never in on the sales and trading desk. I definitely know very little about commodities. So is it more looking at various markets and data coming in and looking at I mean, who knows? I'll I'll stop and let you explain because for me it's totally archaic.

@Commodity101: [00:09:40] Sure. So I was focused mostly on broad based commodity valuations across natural gas power and coal and emissions desks started out on coal and emissions. It's a relatively pretty simple market at the end of the day, especially back in 2010. It's changed a bit since, but long story, it's basically valuing commodity derivative products that are that are associated with those particular desks, like I said, gas power or coal and emissions at that point, you know, trying to assess different valuation risks in terms of option Greeks, different liquidity measures. A lot of these were for pretty strategic deals, structured transactions, not necessarily just vanilla contracts. Got it. I'll give you an example. We modeled some long dated physical, physical power deals into the Midwest region. That was miso. The miso power system worked on some veeps, which are volumetric production payment agreements. They're basically asset backed volumetric production deals. So essentially, instead of getting paid in cash, you receive the physical collateral. So the physical gas, let's say, got it, developed some different valuation methodologies for understanding carbon legislation risk at the time. Again, this was nine, ten years ago at this point. Carbon pricing risk was always at the forefront of folks minds. Europe was way ahead of the US at that point. So leveraging that, so that economic variable and when you're dealing with these longer dated kind of bespoke transactions. So a lot of these kind of long dated power deals which are known as tolling agreements or different hedging strategies that were associated with these pretty bespoke deals. I actually had the chance while I was there to to do a little expatriate stint over in Budapest, actually to train and manage the team remotely, post that stint. We were standing the team out there and a lot of these folks were very, very bright. I'd say mostly quantitative minded, but understanding and kind of training them on what are the fundamentals of the commodities markets, since that's where we were expanding our focus, obviously over there.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:11:50] And I assumed to be able to do this work, you're just have certain data sources that you rely on that are just kind of pulling in a bunch of stuff as it has become much more quantitative nowadays, I assume, than it was back then. Or is it still.

@Commodity101: [00:12:05] I think that's a fair statement. Yeah. There's still a lot of the major players who were around back then and pretty well established. But there are some new kids on the block. Like one of the reasons I joined Ursa in particular, actually, I sort of saw where the future of the industry is going, in my opinion, and that is more data focused, more quant focused. Right. And anybody everybody is fighting for margin. At the end of the day, margins are tight now, especially currently versus back then. And at the end of the day, the more data you have, the more of an intelligence advantage or information advantage you have. And doing some of these more satellite radar analytics that we're focused on is one way that folks are getting that advantage now. So helping to build that out for oil and gas markets and expanding into sort of financial hedge fund community as well is one of the things that that I was drawn towards and kind of building out where I see the future of the industry going cool. And so digitizing commodities, trading a bit.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:13:02] You make sense. Totally. And so you're you're at this bulge bracket, you're there for a few years, you know, day four, you're thrown to the wolves, you manage to manage to swim. And then it sounds like you learned probably a ton in those those two two plus years. What kind of made you think it's time to move on or what kind of prompted that next jump to a trading desk at another firm?

@Commodity101: [00:13:25] Yeah, at that point, I mean, again, taking a look back, this was post-recession. It was pretty obvious that Dodd-Frank in particular was going to be limiting some of the commodities trading division's scope going forward. And a lot of us saw the writing on the wall. So myself and, you know, a lot of folks from my team actually moved on to a large physical trading shop that wasn't necessarily going to be impacted by that type of regulation. So, again, this is this is a move right around, say, two or three years after 2010 or 2012, 2014, time timeline moved to basically one of the top largest global physical trading shops around and going to prop desk there to move from sort of more of the valuation side for these kind of hedging strategies and more kind of bespoke structured deals to more doing essentially management of a multi million dollar portfolio of different, different commodities. And this was more focused on natural gas liquids and gels like propane, butane, butane and NAFTA.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:14:33] And it was their own it was their own.

@Commodity101: [00:14:34] Type of.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:14:34] Product. It was their own capital, right? So it's a prop desk. So you're actually putting capital, correct, versus, you know, taking versus providing products.

@Commodity101: [00:14:41] And this was more this was more physically inclined. So, again, you could probably gather from what I mentioned earlier about the internships and the double major and all that. I wanted to sort of build my career in terms of, well, groundedness and see a lot of different markets. So, you know, my first job out of undergrad going focused on gas, natural gas, power, coal and emissions. Then I wanted to move into more of the oil focused commodities. So again, Engels, gasoline did a lot of physical blending strategies for gasoline. So internally, helping our NAFTA is pretty key. And after butane in particular are pretty key components to gasoline blending. So working with our gasoline desk on physical strategies there as well as more just outright crude oil. So doing a lot of market research and sort of forward analysis on what are the basic economic fundamentals, commodity fundamentals, where the market trends developed, some different crack spread strategies, which are basically targeting two detailed propane versus WTI, WTI being the North American crude oil benchmark, Brent being the international branch benchmark. This was a time when doing any sort of fundamental analysis on supply and demand was pretty obvious. There's going to be an imbalance due to weather. Weather forecasts and similar, similar strategies that you could look at seasonality of different butane products, in particular due to regulatory seasonality, etc.. So a lot of different interesting market dynamics going on at the time. This is when shale was really ramping up and looking into a lot of fundamental research that led to the conclusion that we should be building out a pet chem desk, helped build out a pet chem desk down in Houston. Given how kind of viable and lucrative expanding the firm's footprint to that market would be, given where margins were and just simply sort of the relative market dynamics at that point.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:16:39] I'm curious of your role specifically at when you're brought in, you have only about two and one half years of experience at an undergrad. How much of these initiatives are driven by like a PM versus do they expect you to kind of be coming up with these strategies and doing the research, the proprietary research on your own for these ideas of, hey, I'm going to look at look at this crack spread strategy, you know, is it something you're coming up with your own is something people are telling you, directing you to research and look into more or what's or is it just obvious for someone in your market?

@Commodity101: [00:17:11] So this was a relatively small desk that the desk and myself, there were other desks that were a bit larger, some were not, let's say. So at the end of the day, you need to be constantly glued into what's going on in the markets and thinking creatively, Taking a deep dive into this particular market. I had not a whole lot of experience in NGOs in particular. It's a relatively niche market, even within commodities and energy in particular. So again, getting up to speed on those markets, doing your own independent research, but also taking the brains of the seasoned vets around you at the same time helps kind of connect the dots, getting access to different data sets and just trusting in your own intuition of where you see the market trends going, both from a fundamental. I personally do a little bit of technical. I don't rely much on it, but I'd imagine some folks who are listening are probably more technically inclined than others. Commodities in general, at the end of the day, kind of rely on fundamentals. It's just a main driver of how these markets move.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:18:16] Even if there's.

@Commodity101: [00:18:17] Generally how I would focus my mine. Yeah, that's how I focus my research in particular.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:18:21] So when you look at like temporary price, like mispricing, you just look at that and say, okay, well the supply demand economics here don't make sense. It's going to it's going to the price has to move in this direction eventually kind of thing like relative value or is it am I thinking it the wrong way? Is it like.

@Commodity101: [00:18:40] That's one way to think of it. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts to it, depending it's different by every market you're dealing with. There's a whole slew and you're talking about commodities, different key kind of physical attributes that you're talking about. I mean, delivery costs, transportation is a big factor to consider. It can completely blow up the icons of your trade relationships with folks on the shipping side, for example. Those are always helpful. But understanding the physical characteristics, whether it's for crude or heavy sour or light sweet, does that make it more or less valuable, etc.? What is the forward curve look like? Prompt different? It's all relative spread at the end of the day, a lot of times headlines you'll see headlines of WTI at $55 today. But at the end of the day, when traders are thinking about these things, it's all about relative value. And relativity in terms of.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:19:33] Spreads makes sense.

@Commodity101: [00:19:34] And quality location, time, in terms of storage, all of that has to be taken into account when you're dealing with physical markets.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:19:42] So, you know, you're on a really small team. It's just you and you're the head of the desk right there working on this specific these specific products. Is it something where you're working super long hours because of that and there's a lot of pressure on you? Or did you feel like it was something that you were given several weeks to kind of come up with something and kind of come back to him? Or was it like super high, high pressure and long hours?

@Commodity101: [00:20:06] Well, the head of our head of the desk was a former Marine sergeant in Afghanistan. So he was like, I go back to my comment about psychology, you know, being able to understand people's motivations. And like most of Wall Street, there are some egos to deal with. But we got along very well and learned a ton from him because obviously high, high pressure situations you're in. It wasn't just a necessarily team of the two of us. We did have folks who did physical operations and risk and the accounting, etc. So there's a lot of support and sort of it as well that goes into kind of managing a desk. The physical operators and the folks in risk also are key elements to all this.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:20:46] So are you doing like 60 hours a week? You'd say something like that, 70.

@Commodity101: [00:20:51] Probably closer to 70, 75. Something along those lines.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:20:54] Yeah. Okay. Well, you're a couple of years out of school and. Was that the head of the guy you were working close to, that guy. Is he doing similar hours at that point? And is that something like you considered staying on to eventually have your own run your own desk? Or is it something that that would have taken like ten years or five years.

@Commodity101: [00:21:13] That probably would have taken a lot longer? Honestly, you sort of have to build your own business and from the ground up and building those relationships. I was relatively green in the market at that point, obviously. For me, again, continuing that trend of wanting to continue the well, groundedness I had up to this point had done gas and power coal and now done some of the crude on the NGL gasoline and crude markets, but that was more sort of physically inclined. My next move was to a pretty large investment management firm. Like I mentioned earlier, that was building out their alternative investment business. So I was essentially a junior portfolio manager for Multiasset alternative investment funds, helping to manage about $40 Billion in AUM for some of these hybrid portfolios. There was everything from equities, commodities, real estate, F, X, M exposures, whole slew of strategies, factor funds, which I'd imagine a lot of folks are pretty familiar with in the in the what podcast.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:22:18] What did you what did you.

@Commodity101: [00:22:19] Like at the end of the day wanted.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:22:20] To that what did you like best.

@Commodity101: [00:22:21] I wanted to more again kind of keep that well, groundedness and kind of complement my physical background with more of the financial sort of energy derivative side of the business as well.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:22:30] That's fair. And so what did you like most about that specific position when you jump to the multi asset alternative investment?

@Commodity101: [00:22:36] I enjoyed I mean, definitely worked with some very, very intelligent individuals coming from a very different perspective. So I had gone from being surrounded by folks who were deep dive experts in their particular markets. Some focused on one commodity markets, some were kind of broad around various commodity markets, but we all sort of lived and breathed commodities moving to the investment management space. Most folks had CFAs understood sort of equity valuation, etc., relative value in that sense, But sort of being the only quote unquote commodities guy was definitely kind of a learning curve. But for me, I wanted I enjoyed learning and broadening my experience to be more financially inclined in that sense. So it was kind of a nice compliment where I was sort of be the commodities alternatives guy, if you will, and kind of bouncing ideas off folks who are coming from a different perspective there.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:23:31] From currency or real estate or emerging market or some other.

@Commodity101: [00:23:34] Exactly. Yeah.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:23:35] And then so specifically, you know, you were at the gasoline trading desk for a little over a year as well. Was there something that prompted kind of that next jump? Again, it was just I think you said you wanted to continue broadening your your background and getting that that experience. Was it just that just as searching for to learn more, continue learning?

@Commodity101: [00:23:55] Yeah, I kind of felt like early in my career I wanted to again, sort of soak up going back to the analogy of just being a sponge and soaking up as much as I could and building out that well, groundedness and didn't necessarily want to be sort of one market focused because I think at the end of the day, early on in your career, I think you can actually build a competitive advantage for your own sort of career path by being well rounded in that sense, especially with commodities. It's very easy to just be sort of the oil person or the power person, and that that's the only market you ever really see. But at least the way that I see the markets being able to see across, it's all a domino effect. Nothing can be looked at in sort of isolation these days, especially after the shale revolution. So understanding kind of that domino effect and how they're all sort of interconnected, in my opinion, made me a more valuable asset on the team as opposed to just understanding how, let's say, power worked.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:24:50] Do you feel like that played out that that that play out?

@Commodity101: [00:24:53] There are so many nuances to each one of these markets and they're very complex in the way that they're interconnected. But obviously you can build a very successful career in just one niche market. But in my at least from my perspective, I wanted to be more well rounded in that sense and understanding how they're all kind of connected in that sense.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:25:10] Okay, so you made that jump to the Multiasset Alternative investment manager. As a as a junior PM, you said, and you're running that and then kind of what was what was next before you kind of jump to Ursa as your final as your final step?

@Commodity101: [00:25:24] Sure. So, you know, on and off in my career, I'd met some folks who have gone through the professional certification route. There was one company in particular that was building out a certification for folks in the energy markets to basically be sort of like the CFA for energy, if you will. It was relatively young and they had never actually had anybody from industry help create it. So I was approached and I thought it would actually be a pretty unique way to sort of not necessarily give back. Kind of leverage my, well, groundedness that I had been building up at that point from both a physical and financial market perspective. And I also cross energy commodity market perspective to kind of help help curate what the content should be. What if folks who hit the industry need to know? You hear in the news all of these desks that blow up and you think, well, if you can give back and sort of help avoid those type of situations in the future and get more folks to understand sort of all this domino effect and all that kind of cross interconnectedness, maybe there can be less of these type of occurrences in the future. So that's really why I joined. There was a unique opportunity to basically head up their global energy strategy and grow the business from a sort of strategic business development perspective. And a lot of folks in the industry energy is notorious for being opaque at the end of the day.

@Commodity101: [00:26:53] So I thought it would be a nice way to sort of get folks up to speed quickly, especially I do quite a bit of mentoring for for alumni at my university. And a lot of folks ask, how did you break into this industry? And honestly, it was really just hard work and I suppose being lucky at the time. But you know, it's a relatively small industry and it comes down to what do you know about the markets? And a lot of times just to even get your self in the door for that interview, you need to sort of sort of prove yourself saying, I know commodity markets are something at least about it. So this was one way for folks to kind of take the certification, even if they had no energy experience. Maybe they wanted to pivot away from one market that they were focused on and get into this sector. So folks across integrated oil and gas majors or power utilities or banks, hedge funds, private equity folks or consultants who kind of had their one one market perspective or maybe had the experience in gas and really wanted to learn the power or oil markets a bit more. So I thought it was a unique way to kind of get folks a practical way of getting up to speed quickly on these particular markets. And I enjoyed.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:28:01] Can we share, can we share with that? Can we share what that certification is or do you prefer not to?

@Commodity101: [00:28:06] Sure. It's it's called the ERP. It's the energy risk professional. It's by the Global Association Global Association of Risk Professionals known as GARP. So it's been around for about probably about seven, eight years at this point and grown quite nicely across the industry in terms of reputation and folks from all different sectors getting involved in it. I would highly recommend folks listening to take a look into it. If this is an industry you want to break into, it can be much easier said than done. And this is one way to kind of prove yourself. If you're going into an interview and say, I have already passed the ERP, I understand sort of practitioner focused macroeconomic trends for energy across physical financial markets and understand how to manage risk and not blow up a desk, let's say.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:28:53] So kind of a.

@Commodity101: [00:28:55] Kind of a nice way to show you have the kind of critical competencies to really evaluate those commercial decisions. If we're going to be on a commercial desk or risk management from from various perspectives.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:29:06] And at least you're putting in the effort, you're learning from somewhere, you know, that's exactly that says a.

@Commodity101: [00:29:11] Lot, too. And one of the nice one of the nice points is they change the curriculum every year. So, you know, there's some certifications that are relatively.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:29:20] Static.

@Commodity101: [00:29:21] Kind of stagnant. And some of the techniques don't necessarily need to be changed year over year. But commodity markets, energy markets in particular are so rapidly moving that it's nice to see that they keep up with the times and get folks confident in what's what's coming ahead. At least.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:29:40] That's great. Another question do you mind sharing from when you graduated to up through now, do you mind sharing like ranges of pay that you had in terms of it doesn't have to tell us exactly, but approximately to give the listeners some sort of sense of what they could expect as an assistant portfolio manager and stuff like that all the way up through. Or is it something you. Sure, sure. Yeah. Okay, Go.

@Commodity101: [00:30:01] Ahead. Sure. I mean, it depends on each obviously depends on a lot of different factors. It depends on the type of institution that you're with. But I would say out of university, it's not not unreasonable to expect sort of the 70 to 80 range for base plus percent for performance in the physical trading world. A lot of it is sort of percent of book based. So I wouldn't, you know, bases probably around low hundreds, I'd say. But you can get sort of upwards of 20% of percent of book, which can be quite significant depending on obviously performance, sort of eat what you kill mentality, if you will.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:30:45] So you can get up to 20% on book on on. So what would that what would that translate to like 50,000, 200,000, 500,000? Like, could it be that high if.

@Commodity101: [00:30:54] I mean that's where that's where you can get. Yeah. Million dollar bonuses, if you will, depending on how successful you were that year, perhaps.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:31:03] Got it. So it could be either zero or it could be a good point. It could be a zero or it could be super high if the desk does really well.

@Commodity101: [00:31:10] Exactly. Exactly.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:31:12] And what do you think? Like in standard management.

@Commodity101: [00:31:14] Side, it's a little bit different. You don't you don't necessarily have that upside, but base is generally a bit more stable in that sense.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:31:20] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. At the desk, real quick, what do you think is, like, typical for a desk? Does it come out to be like. I know, I know. It's much higher variance compared to, like, an investment banking position in terms of, like, what bonus could be. But would you say the average or the median is closer to like 100 bonus or 50 bonus on that 100 base or low hundreds?

@Commodity101: [00:31:42] Honestly, there is.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:31:43] It's.

@Commodity101: [00:31:43] There is such a wide spectrum. It depends on.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:31:46] What desk you're at.

@Commodity101: [00:31:47] If you're relatively junior, it can be different depending on how much book size you're allotted could be significantly higher. If you're far more seasoned and you're.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:31:56] That's fair.

@Commodity101: [00:31:56] Have free rein. So there's really no no precise way to answer that, unfortunately.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:32:02] Okay. Maybe we can check the company database, see if there's any good salary data on those types of drafts. But anyways. Okay, great. And then anything else? What's next for you? You want to talk a little bit about what you're up to now and then kind of what your next plan is or.

@Commodity101: [00:32:19] Sure. So again, kind of kind of going along the lines of that, well, readiness, if you will. That's kind of how I wanted to structure things. So up to this point, seeing a bunch of different physical and financial energy markets. And like I mentioned earlier, I highly I can't say enough about the power of networking. You absolutely need to be out there and just make connections in the industry. I was actually at a happy hour event a couple of years back and met the co founder of the current company I'm with and we kept in touch and the rest is history when looking to expand their their knowledge base in these physical and financial markets. We got in touch again and the rest is history. So Percy in particular, I think is doing a fantastic job in leveraging what's known as synthetic aperture radar type of satellite radar technology. When I first met this with this co founder who's our chief strategy officer now, my job was on the floor and I said, I wish I knew about this technology when I was Glencore, because it's extraordinarily valuable in terms of making valuable insights into what's actually happening on a global basis. So I'll give you an example. There's quite a few white papers and sort of pal structured trades strategies that I've written up on our website, different blog scenarios that connect the dots to what we're seeing in our in our data versus macroeconomics and sort of geopolitics. So I recommend, if you want to take a look at any of those, it's a good way to kind of see how you can leverage this data for sort of pal strategies.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:33:58] What's the website?

@Commodity101: [00:33:59] But at the end of the hour on our website, it's just or space.com. So we my my focus in particular is trying to drive our thought leadership and leveraging this new type of technology, sort of geospatial intelligence, to kind of deliver that transparency and these pretty opaque markets. Like what is if I were to ask you, what are oil inventories right now in China, you'd probably have to rely on two month stale data that the Chinese government is producing. And we all know there are decent sized geopolitical grains of salt that need to be applied to that. The same can be said with different government data that comes out of the Middle East and OPEC. So up until this point, traders had to sort of rely on these relatively lagged stale data sets. And that's not necessarily that may be how the old way of doing things worked, but. This sort of cutting edge technology is really going to be, in my opinion, changing the name of the game when it comes to commodities trading. So it's all about who has that sort of information advantage for sure. So that's one area that I'm focused on as well as kind of building out different core competencies to again, help out our commodities trading, our hedge fund and kind of banking clientele base. Understand how can you leverage this for for pal purposes excuse me getting kind of unique analytics on sort of macroeconomic trends, different market fundamentals and sort of sentiment indicators, things like that. I'll give you one example. Venezuela and Iran have been obviously hot button stories throughout the year and understanding what's actually happening. Boots on the ground in kind of an unbiased way in real time is pretty powerful. Same with the Chinese economy looking at what was actually happening, boots on the ground there. I'll leave it. I'll leave it at that in pretty high level terms. But there's a lot.

@Commodity101: [00:35:59] More.

@Commodity101: [00:36:00] Folks want to take a look at the website that's on there where we're connecting the dots with all of these kind of moving parts throughout the year. Every week, one of my colleagues and I publish pretty unique insights because again, at the end of the day, we're one of the few, the few companies that actually has access to this type of technology. It's actually an ex-government technology that we're leveraging for commercial purposes. So we've got a pretty unique background. A lot of the folks in the company are sort of X satellites, X radar engineers, etc. who really can understand how to dissect this data. There are there's a lot of power in the satellite intelligence these days, and there's some folks who are focused in sort of the optical side, which is as if your camera were taking a picture of the earth and unfortunately, you're dealing with cloud coverage. Sometimes I think the stat is actually about two thirds of the earth is covered in clouds and in a given point in time. That's a lot. And we're leveraging a type of radar that actually penetrates through clouds and works 24 seven. So it's awesome.

@Commodity101: [00:37:03] When you're dealing with.

@Commodity101: [00:37:04] China, for example, it can be pretty difficult dealing with fog and smog and all that kind of cloud coverage issues. So we've found a way to deal with all of that.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:37:12] That's great. Anything else you want to share with the listeners before any words of wisdom that you would have given yourself when you were younger?

@Commodity101: [00:37:23] That's a great question. There's tons of resources out there online these days if folks are wanting to get into the industry. At the end of the day, I think the ERP program, the energy professional certifications are really valuable tool that when I started out didn't really exist, especially to the capacity it does now. So that's one one pretty quick way to get up to speed in a pretty condensed and quick fashion and get up to speed on all things commodities, energy, commodities, at least for sure. There's one little tidbit I remember hearing back in the day. You never want to be the smartest guy in the room. I think that that was pretty valuable advice. Being part of teams where. You can rely on all these other folks in the room and have that deep dive expertise that you may or may not have. And kind of soaking that up, I think has been pretty valuable in at least my career up to this point.

Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:38:22] That's great. Well, I think we'll leave it at that. I appreciate you taking the time and commodity 1 to 1. Thanks so much. And thanks to you, my listeners at Wall Street Oasis. If you have any suggestions whatsoever, please don't hesitate to send them my way. Patrick at Wall Street. Oasis Dotcom. And till next time?

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