From Slack to Success: The Real-Time Rush of Bunker Trading

One of the things I like about bunkering is the fact that we are always learning. I learn new things every day. 

 

A great example of this is learning about bunker trading. I confess I have always thought bunker traders were a fun if rather blunt instrument until recently. Moving to Shipergy has seen me use Slack, which for those of you who do not know, is an online platform where you have channels and threads and is ideally suited for bunker companies. Each trade has a thread and each thread goes in a specific channel. Because I am plugged into the threads I see the trading happening in real time in a way that I’d not seen before. It really is fascinating. 

 

You have customer traders working with a customer on an enquiry or enquiries and working super closely with the supply trader to get prices from suppliers or other traders to give to the customer. There is a lot of back and forth, a lot of moving parts, lots of different specs and quantities and I was a bit surprised to see the timing validities that they work to. Sometimes you might see customer traders working enquiries in the European morning to get it fixed before Asian closing and when that happens you’ll see prices flashing back and forth with very short time limits attached to them as the Asian suppliers work to close the book for the day. Messages flash up too fast to keep track of, littered with abbreviations and jargon. The only thing I can liken it to is if you’ve ever heard Air Traffic Control at a busy international airport. It is almost too fast to follow, some of it you don’t understand as it is too technical, and occasionally they drop out of English and into their native language from time to time. 

 

In a rush of alerts and popups you’ll see firm counters going back and forth, suppliers giving better prices for different specs and so on if they get the enquiry firm and either fixing it or not, and seeing the price it eventually went for and to which trader. 

 

What strikes me is how time consuming the process is but also, paradoxically, how fast-paced it is. It is a seriously dynamic thing. You can put your phone down, go to make a cup of tea, come back and see fifty Slack messages in busy times in just a few minutes as prices are being passed back and forth, especially when the market rushes to fix things when they see the index pricing change. We have a sizeable number of customer traders now and seeing all these in full flow, rattling off the minutiae of the trades to our supply traders across a number of trades in several different ports at once, is a hugely impressive thing to be connected into. If I have been, let’s say, unaware of the technicality of the job bunker traders do, I am not any more. 

 

As the person responsible for credit and compliance at Shipergy, my job is to provide clearances on both to the trader in good time to ensure they have the best chance of winning the enquiry by not making them wait, so response times are really important. Often when there is an issue, I need to work with the trader to solve it and this requires fast thinking, a problem-solving mentality and a winningness to compromise to get the deal done if at all possible. I learned quickly where I need to be looking and paying attention, when and what the traders need from me and when. The situational awareness I gain from this is astounding. Being interwoven into the fabric of how we work in this way makes me wonder how I ever managed it before.

 

Like any credit manager, I’ve shared in jest some occasionally uncomplimentary things about traders in the past (all absolutely deserved obviously!) but it is only at Shipergy have I learned to really and I mean really, truly respect and understand what they do and how they do it. It is vastly more technical than I realised. I have a new understanding now of the mindset of the successful traders and this has shaped some ideas of how we can go about shaping this in our new juniors as we bring them in. 

 

Shipergy is in some ways a new breed of tech-led bunker traders that leverages the advantages gained from using tech wisely, into efficiency and situational awareness gains that go far beyond what trading platform you use. 

 

The traders get a boost from it too. It allows them to be quicker to the punch and I’ve come to know now how important it is to have what the customer wants exactly where they want it, at exactly the right moment. They are more competitive because of this. It has been a real pleasure to watch a group of fantastically talented professionals do their thing, it really has. They are a resourceful, tenacious, driven, aggressive and technically expert team who are absolutely at the top of their game every day, come rain, shine, sickness, health or whatever, no matter whatever else is going on, 24/7/365. It really is incredibly impressive what they do and how they do it. 

 

It’s fair to say I have a new found level of respect for bunker traders now. Here’s to you, ladies and gentlemen traders, thanks for all you do.