according to bloomberg, there are many commodity traders who are in line to receive multiple millions each for shorting natural gas last year
Seven-Figure Bonuses Rise This Season for Top Energy Traders
one of the desk heads they interviewed said something along the lines of there being a clear trend & so they made lots of profits
which made me curious about a few things:
- if they can only make outsize profits with clear trend, why don't they just farm out trading to managed futures funds, ie. trend followers by definition, instead of filling seats with manual traders who do the same thing in placing discretionary trades
- even most institutional stock / bond traders don't necessarily make 7/8 figures during the bull market for being long, how come the commodity guys are able to negotiate packages that give them that much upside for essentially taking a directional view and holding onto the position
- what sort of skills are we talking about? it sounded like they were trading electronic contracts instead of doing physical arbitrage and all that - so i guess some combo of fundamental analysis + technicals + maybe grouping together to "smash the close" so to speak in driving the trend in everyone's favor?
also in the aggregate, if the large companies like Royal Dutch and some German utility they named made XX millions in profits from trading futures each, then that must mean a LOT of retail guys subsidized their winnings. because most pension funds, etc don't have exposure to commodity futures
would be good to explore the mechanics of how they trade & get in on a piece of the action
if a whole group of them are doing roughly similar things - enough of them so that they became a point of discussion in the news - then probably their techniques aren't that secret
Seven-Figure Bonuses Rise This Season for Top Energy Traders
one of the desk heads they interviewed said something along the lines of there being a clear trend & so they made lots of profits
which made me curious about a few things:
- if they can only make outsize profits with clear trend, why don't they just farm out trading to managed futures funds, ie. trend followers by definition, instead of filling seats with manual traders who do the same thing in placing discretionary trades
- even most institutional stock / bond traders don't necessarily make 7/8 figures during the bull market for being long, how come the commodity guys are able to negotiate packages that give them that much upside for essentially taking a directional view and holding onto the position
- what sort of skills are we talking about? it sounded like they were trading electronic contracts instead of doing physical arbitrage and all that - so i guess some combo of fundamental analysis + technicals + maybe grouping together to "smash the close" so to speak in driving the trend in everyone's favor?
also in the aggregate, if the large companies like Royal Dutch and some German utility they named made XX millions in profits from trading futures each, then that must mean a LOT of retail guys subsidized their winnings. because most pension funds, etc don't have exposure to commodity futures
would be good to explore the mechanics of how they trade & get in on a piece of the action
if a whole group of them are doing roughly similar things - enough of them so that they became a point of discussion in the news - then probably their techniques aren't that secret
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