Goodbye To All That

At the beginning of August 1976 I started working as a  trainee for the august sugar house of Czarnikow. Today, 39 years later, I am leaving the City having been an oil futures broker since 1981. 

Forgive me for being sentimental, but I look back with gratitude and pleasure at the good fortune I enjoyed working with both clients and colleagues who were very different from the Wall Street traders portrayed in Hollywood films. Sure, the City and international oil trading is competitive and the rules of capitalism dictate that only the fittest survive. However, in a sometimes stressful environment, the humour, tolerance and good manners of clients and colleagues is what I chiefly remember.

While the oil trading business changed as the trading companies that sprang up in the 1970s struggled to compete with banks in the 1980s and hedge funds came along in the 1990s and electronic exchanges not long after that, most of the same people stayed in the industry adapting as the world changed. In 1981 it looked as if oil prices would be stabilised by Saudi Arabia acting as a “swing” producer; this only lasted until 1985. Today there is no such certainty for oil prices and there is more need than ever for markets in which to hedge and speculate. A trainee starting in the industry on Monday morning may well have a 39 years career ahead of him or her. I hope so.

The City of London has prospered for many centuries through an ability to adapt and encourage new businesses and new technology. When The New York Mercantile Exchange wanted to bring electronic trading terminals to London in the 1990s, I was at first opposed. I thought that business would be transacted on those terminals that would otherwise have been done on the open outcry trading floor of The International Petroleum Exchange, of which I was a director then. A civil servant from the Dept. of Trade and Industry, who had to permit this new technology, put me right.

“If this computer trading doesn’t work, you’ve nothing to be worried about, Christopher. But if it does work it’s essential that you know how to use it and we can have it here too.”

Wise words that encapsulate a philosophy.