Cashing in on Covid: the traders who thrive on a crisis

When we think of those lurching moments last spring when it became clear that much of the world, not just one or two regions, would grind to a halt, for most of us it is anything but a fond memory. But the traders of Glencore probably remember the time differently: they saw it as an unprecedented opportunity to cash in.

Anticipating a global slowdown, they bought up all the space they could to store oil, including tankers capable of holding 3.2 million barrels. When the markets caught up with the scale of the pandemic, the price of oil dropped to zero and below, and in they swooped. They took the oil for free, stored it at sea, and sold it a few months later. While we worried about our livelihoods, Glencore’s traders made $1.3 bn trading energy.

This is just one of dozens of tales which fill Javier Blas and Jack Farchy’s swashbuckling history of a profession most of us would write off as unbearably boring: the life of a commodities trader. Grain, gold, iron and oil might be what make the world work, but few of us think of them as riveting subjects. That, it turns out, suits the traders just fine. When asked about the book during an interview with the authors, Ian Taylor, then CEO of one of the trading houses, said simply: ‘We would prefer you not to write it.’

The industry’s real story, at least as told here, reads more like a globe-spanning corporate thriller, full of intrigue and double-dealing. The traders jet in where no one else will go, signing deals to ship oil to Libyan rebels, produce aluminium within the Soviet Union, and befriend dictators in order to boost the cobalt trade. Inevitably, when the matter of ‘commissions’ (sometimes in the form of briefcases stuffed with cash) arises, the traders do not flinch — especially since, the book reveals, those foreign bribes were until recently a tax-deductible expense in the businesses’ Swiss headquarters.