You are building the desk, not applying to one.
Independent, starting a desk, or building the tools desks buy: the book has to be right from the first trade. I teach how a desk turns physical contracts into positions, valuation, risk and P&L, and I review what you build before your customers or your board see it.
See the planYour week
Your first cargo is priced off a curve you built. The counterparty's number is different.
The board asks what the position was at four o'clock on Tuesday. Your spreadsheet has moved on since.
A client wants the tool by Friday, and you have never seen a desk's P&L from the inside.
What to learn
Two stages. First, the desk: how a physical contract becomes a position, a mark, a risk number and a P&L line (Physical Foundations, The Global Gas Market, Position Aggregation, Mark to Market and P&L). Then the build: a position and P&L engine, and an LNG cargo P&L engine, written by you and reviewed by me.
Standard
Energy Trading Fundamentals
How energy markets work, from the power station up.
- How power is generated and priced: the merit order and the marginal plant.
- Gas: LNG, storage, NBP and TTF. The spark spread.
- Positions, delta exposure, forward curves and mark-to-market P&L.
- Order books, interconnectors, carbon, limits and VaR.
You come away able to follow a desk's talk of positions, curves and P&L, and to say where each number comes from.
Standard
The Practitioner Track
The instruments and processes, as a desk runs them.
- Day-ahead and intraday power, imbalance, and trading gas in Great Britain.
- Swaps and options: Black 76 and the Greeks.
- EFET and ISDA agreements, PPAs, cross-border capacity and FTRs.
- REMIT, EMIR and MiFID II. Power trading strategies.
- A trade from capture to settlement. The nightly curve run.
You come away able to read a PPA term sheet and follow a trade to settlement.
Standard
Python for Commodities
Python written the way a trading system needs it.
- Structure, data modelling and tests, with every example from trading.
- The clock-change days, money in Decimal, and strict validation at the boundary.
- Tests that protect money, reruns that agree, and audit records.
You come away able to write a nightly settlement and P&L job you can rerun and explain.
Premium
The Systems Builder Track
Projects that build on each other. I review every pull request.
- A price curve simulator: mean reversion, a command line, tests, merit-order dispatch.
- A position and P&L engine: trade ingestion, aggregation, delta and mark-to-market.
- A toy power exchange: an order book, continuous matching, a day-ahead auction and an API.
You come away with working code on GitHub that you can walk an interviewer through.
In their words
"It strips away so much of the unnecessary complexity that traders often add to the market."
Where to start
Premium, because you are building something you will run or sell, and I review it before anyone else does.
Recommended
Premium
Build it, and I check your work.
$397 a month
Or $2,850 a year: you save $1,914.
A month costs less than half a day at the rate desks pay.
- I review every pull request on your projects myself, within three working days.
- I review your CV, then introduce you to recruiters who place into trading technology.
- Bootcamps and one to one are open to Premium members only.
- The Systems Builder Track: hands-on projects.
- My Slack community.
- Everything in Standard.
Submit your first project. If my review isn't worth the month, email me within 14 days for a full refund.
Would you rather have the systems built for you? That is the firm's work: Systems.
A funded team of up to fifteen people trains together on VIP, with a monthly call with me.
I built the trading platforms behind six desks at Shell, and at Centrica and Limejump.
See the plan