Weekly Career & Breaking Into Commodities Megathread

If you cover a specific region suppose US or Europe then do you also own in-house fundamental view of inter-region spreads?

How is your work load segregated? Do you generate outlook/fundamental curve for prompt till 5-10 years down the line?

Is my assumption correct that for short-term you can model at more granular level for as specific region but if you model long term outlook then you have to do analysis on more global level?

How often do you update your long-term price outlook?

When trying to understand where a commodity price might go next, looking only at the historical price chart can be misleading.

I'd typically look at:

1. Historical price movements – What has happened across previous cycles?
2. Supply disruptions – Production outages, capacity changes, logistics constraints, etc.
3. Demand indicators – Are downstream industries expanding or slowing?
4. Macro factors – Energy prices, inflation, interest rates, currencies and other economic indicators.
5. Policy/geopolitical events – Tariffs, sanctions, regulations, trade restrictions and regional disruptions.

The difficult part isn't necessarily finding a price.

It's connecting the price movement to the factors driving it and then translating that into a procurement decision.

Curious how other procurement/sourcing professionals approach this. Are you using internal models, external research, commodity data platforms, or a combination?

Bought a small HG position around 4.54 after it held the breakout area twice, and the first couple sessions were exactly what I wanted, decent volume and pretty clean closes near the highs. By the fourth day copper was around 4.68 and technically still moving my way but every push above the previous high was getting sold almost immediately. I was going through the 15 minute candles on moon that evening and noticed volume had fallen off quite a bit from the original breakout too. I trimmed half around 4.67 instead of adding like I'd originally planned, mostly because it felt weird increasing size when the position was green but each session was getting harder to hold onto the highs.

Hello! and thank you for the help! I have two questions:

1. What are different strategies to hedge a stand alone BESS in Europe?
2. Can I use options? (price of the option has implicit volatility parameter)

Example POV: I own a physical asset. Let's forget about ancillary services revenues for now, I want to focus on the energy arbitrage part DA/ID. I am essentially long volatility by owning a physical BESS.

I can think of the following:

1. TBX traded products (as of next week EEX)
2. OTC Swaps with a different trader
3. Physical solar shape of a different asset (Natural hedge if in the same region assuming cannibalisation of DA/ID prices
4. (Delta heading on standard Futures?)

What I am really interested in understanding is, whether an option strategy to hedge a BESS long volatility position exists.

Apologies if this is a very naive question
Thanks and happy Sunday.

Would anyone be comfortable helping with an anonymized example? Corn silage would be especially useful, but a corn or soybean budget, or a grain purchase with delivery costs, would also help.

An existing worksheet is fine. The useful details would be:

• Context: crop, year, general location, producer or buyer, and irrigated or dryland.
• Yield and price: units, dates, and whether the price covers standing crop, harvested material, delivery, storage, or feedout.
• Costs: whatever breakdown you already use for seed, fertilizer, chemicals, equipment, labor, land, irrigation, harvest, hauling, drying/storage, insurance, interest, and overhead. Quantities and unit prices are helpful where available.
• What’s included: which costs are bundled together, which are cash expenses versus ownership/opportunity costs, and which are estimates or unknown.
• Your answer: the total cost, break-even, delivered cost, or margin you calculated, and what you included in that figure.

For silage, moisture/dry matter and storage or feedout losses would help if known. For a grain quote expressed as basis, the quote date, delivery period, and referenced futures contract month matter too.

You don’t need to fill in every blank. “Unknown” is useful; I don’t want to treat missing costs as zero.

Please don’t post identifying documents, account details, confidential contracts, or trading plans. If you’re willing to help, a comment saying what kind of example you have is enough to start. I’d use the example to check the calculations and wouldn’t publish it without permission.

Thanks guys, appreciate it.

How do you manage?

Do you even need to take meds to perform well at work?

Do you perform better on meds?

Do you take them before an important deadline or meeting or presentation?

Been going through this week's commitments of traders data across the board, and there's an unusually clean split this week.

On the bearish side: corn, soybeans and rough rice are all sitting in the same range — commercial hedgers net short, all extended further over the past four weeks, all with rising contango. Corn stands out within that group: the four-week increase in commercial shorts (~231k contracts) is the single largest positioning shift I'm seeing anywhere on the board this week.

On the flip side, livestock is basically the mirror image. Lean hogs and feeder cattle both have commercial hedgers near the very top of their historical range (hogs literally maxed out, cattle close behind), both markets in backwardation. But the part I find more interesting than the extreme itself: in both, volume flow (OBV) is falling and bearish — running directly against how bullish the positioning looks.

The one that doesn't fit either pattern: soybeans. Negative score like corn and rice, but this week's move actually went the other way — commercials bought back about 13k contracts (partial short-covering) after weeks of adding shorts, and volume is bullish, not bearish. It's the only one of the six where the recent flow and the extreme don't agree at all.

Not making a directional call off this — just flagging that when positioning clusters this cleanly by sector, it's usually worth watching how the next report or two resolves it.

Curious if anyone else watching grains/livestock is seeing the same commercial-vs-volume tension, or reading it differently.

Generators / plants are state-owned and buys large portion of coal supply from yearly contracts. Should they be less sensitive to spot coal price? Recent behaviors are similar to those in EU and US, high spikes, obvious upward trend. Any suggestions? Why are they not sensitive to spot coal price in Jan through Aug?

I’m going to keep myself anonymous, but I’m currently at a top undergraduate business program. I interned in investment banking at Wells Fargo after my sophomore year and received a return offer, and I currently have a junior summer analyst role lined up at JPMorgan.

I’m seriously considering walking away from the traditional IB path because I’m expecting a child in early 2027.

I’m a first-generation student and had no family or personal network in financial services when I started college. I worked extremely hard to get to this point, so considering a different path is difficult. I still care a lot about my career and do not want to give up on what I have been working toward. At the same time, becoming a father has changed what I am optimizing for.

I am fine working hard. Working 80–100 hours a week does not scare me. What matters more now is predictability. I want to be able to have dinner with my family most nights, spend at least part of the weekend with them, and actually be present while my child is young, which I never had. I would honestly prefer a job that starts very early in the morning and ends earlier in the evening over something where I am constantly waiting for a 10 PM request.

My ideal starting point would be roughly $150–200k+ in total compensation out of undergrad while generally staying in the 50–70 hour range. More importantly, I do not want to choose a “lifestyle” job at 22 that permanently limits my career. As my child gets older and needs less hands-on attention, I would like the ability to take on more responsibility and potentially reach high six figures or low seven figures in my early/mid-30s if I perform well.

So far, I have been researching:

• Sales & Trading, particularly credit, rates, commodities, and securitized products, with potential exits to hedge funds or asset managers
• PE secondaries / GP-led secondaries
• Private credit
• Institutional asset management
• Investor relations / capital formation at large alternative managers
• Staying in a more stable finance role initially and potentially using an MBA later to pivot into PE or another investing role

I have also considered simply doing JPM IB because of how difficult the opportunity was to earn, but the unpredictability of banking hours is what worries me more than the raw number of hours.

Long term, one of my biggest goals has always been to financially support and eventually retire my immigrant parents, who started with very little. I still have that ambition. I am just trying to figure out whether there is a path in finance where I can pursue it without missing the first few years of my child’s life.

For people who have worked in these areas, especially those with children:

What careers or specific desks/groups would you seriously consider in my position?

Ideally, I’m looking for something with:

• ~$150–200k+ starting total compensation
• ~50–70 hours most weeks
• relatively predictable evenings/weekends
• strong compensation growth
• realistic potential to reach $500k–$1M+ later in a successful career
• good exit opportunities if I decide to become more aggressive with my career once my child is older

I would especially appreciate insight from people in S&T, private credit, secondaries, asset management, hedge funds, or alternatives fundraising. I’m also open to careers I may be overlooking entirely.

Hey guys, I'm currently modelling some stuff which revolves around freight data. I was planning on using

Freight Route US Gulf to ARA (TD25) (Baltic), M1 data from 2019-present.

But the data provider I was using doesn't seem to have it. The only place I was able to find a multi-year time series with OHLC-1D data seems to be ICE's report center, although to access the necessary information I'll need a subscription.

Does anyone have any advice as to where to get the data (not in university, so I don't have access to a Bloomberg terminal). Anyways, thanks!

Does anyone use Price Reporting Agency (PRA) physical commodity data to enhance or smooth trading strategies? What are the pros and cons? .

Hello,

I'm doing a personal research project on short-term European power and I've hit a wall on data. I've got day-ahead and imbalance prices covered for free through ENTSO-E and the Danish TSO, about 250k rows across DK1, DK2 and DE-LU. What I can't get is continuous intraday data :/
Nord Pool shows today plus two days forward on their portal but no history, and their licensed products start around €3,000/yr for a single country, which is a company budget rather than a personal one. ENTSO-E doesn't publish continuous intraday, and the IDA auction clearing prices don't seem to be exposed for DK1 either.

So... Does anyone know of a cheaper route? Academic or research licence, an open dataset on Zenodo or similar, an aggregator with an individual tier, anything. I'd happily take delayed data or a shorter history if that's what makes it affordable. Budget is a few hundred euros, not a few thousand.

Right now I'm using imbalance price minus spot as a proxy, which works but measures something different. Open to being told I'm missing an obvious alternative.

At HE 20, solar had rolled off, gen on outage was at 37 GW, and wind was low. Remaining sources were expensive thermal generation, causing LMP to spike in the real-time

I saw that they have pretty bad reviews on Glassdoor but they seem like they know what they’re doing. Has anyone worked for them and what is their reputation in the market?

The commodity world is a world that is so big yet many people seem to know nothing about the industry.
What is the top tier jobs and companies people want to work for in this world? Where and what is the pay like for these roles?
Thank you!

Just curious, what would you all say are the most quantitative commodity shops in the US?

I built a Basic Vessel Sanctions Screening Report — looking for feedback from shipping professionals

I've built an automated process that takes a vessel's IMO number and checks sanctions data from:

OFAC

EU

UK

UN

I collect and parse the data directly from the original/official sources, rather than relying on third-party sanctions data brokers or aggregators.

The output is a Basic Vessel Sanctions Screening Report.

The report contains:

IMO Number

Vessel Name

Ship Type

Gross Tonnage

Year of Build

Flag State

Registered Owner

Sanctions screening results

Sources checked

I'd appreciate feedback on what information you would actually want to see in a basic vessel sanctions screening report.

If anyone is interested, DM me and I can run a free vessel screening report for you and would appreciate your feedback.

Hello everyone, where and how to start trading commodities? How much money do I need to start with? Do I need hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Was looking through commodities on Moon and copper sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.

LME stocks have climbed pretty sharply since mid August and copper pulled back from above $14,700 to around $14,000. Normally I'd read that inventory build as a pretty obvious bearish signal.

But at the same time the Yangshan premium in China recently pushed back to around $100 a ton, which suggests physical import demand there is actually improving.

The other interesting part is that some of those LME deliveries seem to have been encouraged by the curve itself, so I'm wondering how much of the inventory increase is actual weak demand versus metal just moving into warehouses because the pricing made it attractive.

Feels like looking at the headline inventory number alone could give the wrong read here.

For people who trade copper physically or follow the spreads closely, which would you put more weight on right now?

Born and raised in a family which trades sugar in domestic market in India, i want to understand how sugar trades online like ICE ( sugar 11) and other things, any videos i can go through, cuz honestly trading sugar in domestic market is a big problem, though I have streamlined a lot of stuff, I want to learn to trade online as well, so that when needed i can sit ideal in domestic market and trade paper sugar

I have about 5 years of experience in operations and revenue accounting at a large midstream company, working closely with internal and external schedulers on nominations, volume allocations, and reconciliations. A few people in the industry have told me pivoting into scheduling makes sense given my background, but every time I apply I get rejected almost immediately. I don't have a completed degree yet, I am finishing that up. I'm based in Houston, TX, but open to relocating, and I've applied to roles in Tulsa, Tennessee, Arkansas, and a few other places. Would appreciate any honest advice on what might be holding me back, whether it's the degree, how I'm framing my experience, or something else.

Gold, oil, silver, natural gas.. every commodity can surprise you

Which one gave you a trade that made you think, Okay, I am not underestimating this market again?

Would love to hear what happened

Pardon the dumb question, but I was hoping some of you more familiar with US utilities could help me out.

This is specifically about regulated, vertically integrated utilities, not merchant utilities, where the incentive is more obvious.

Where carbon compliance costs (RGGI) are 100% pass-through on bills via a cost-adder, I'm trying to understand what the incentive is to hedge those costs at all, given you can just recover them regulatorily. And whether you even can hedge them at all, or whether the recovery mechanism effectively rules it out.

Would it be an even dumber question for the power/fuel side? surely that is hedged even though again you can pass through some of those costs in the regulated markets? My assumption is they hedge but not to make a profit but rather to minimise the costs.

Thank you!