On patience in commodity intermediation.

Most of what is written about commodity trading concerns the trade itself — the cargo, the spread, the timing of a fixture. Little is written about the years that precede the first cargo. Yet in our experience, those years are the trade.

A counterparty is not a name on a contract; it is a habit of conduct observed across cycles. We have refused mandates that priced well because the counterparty had, in a previous turn of the market, behaved in a way we could not reconcile. We have accepted mandates that priced thinly because the counterparty had, across years, met its obligations without theatre.

Patience, in this context, is not an aesthetic preference. It is a working assumption that the relationships which compound — refineries, ministries, family-owned trading houses, sovereign buyers — do so on a timescale measured in decades, not quarters. A house that needs a trade this month will accept terms it should not accept. A house that does not need the trade can wait for the right one.

This is the posture the group asks of its energy desk. It is also the reason the desk is small, deliberately. Scale, in intermediation, is not a virtue when it begins to require trades the house would otherwise decline.