Q 10/16/2009 @ 6:25PM How To Become An Oil Trader Liren Pan tried to keep quiet while typing away at his laptop computer last week in the library of Washington University. After finishing up a statistics exam, the 26-year old business student was vying to win a simulated oil futures trading competition on which his future career could depend. http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/16/oil-trading-personal-finance-college-simulation.html “I want to become an energy trader after I graduate,” says Pan, who will rejoin the work world in 2011. It’s a controversial career move, considering that oil traders, in particular oil speculators, have been cast as public enemies for allegedly driving up the cost of fuel. Now, through his trading competition, a university professor is attempting to launch a new generation into the occupation. Eighty-four students on 21 teams spread among 13 schools are currently competing in a mock crude oil and natural gas futures trading market in a simulation, the first part of which will conclude Oct. 23. The top seven teams, with up to 28 students in all, will then meet in November. On the line: Coveted internships with energy and trading companies. The real kicker: Those who make the most money may not emerge victorious. That’s because the rivalry is not about raw speculation; it’s about risk management, says the man in charge of the contest, Tulane University professor Joseph LeBlanc. He spent 25 years in the oil and gas industry, 15 of them either trading or overseeing traders. The participating students come from schools ranging from Penn State to the University of Chicago. Many of the undergraduates and graduate students are members of campus energy and finance clubs. This month they’re being judged daily on their performance, using a volatility methodology known as the ulcer index, which balances their returns against the risks they incur. The scoring system is skewed so that any losses count against students, even if they’re temporary and quickly reversed. “These [energy] companies don’t want to hire riverboat gamblers,” says Leo Murphy, university relations program manager of Trading Technologies, which has the provided students with the same software professional energy traders use. For research and charting, students are using a professional product from Thomson Reuters. The final seven teams will meet at Tulane University in next month. There, they will address a panel of judges, describing their strategies, such as whether they intend to hold intra-day or day-long positions. Then they will spend four hours on a Saturday in simulated trading markets. During this round, each student will compete as an individual. When the trading is over, they will meet the judges again to discuss their results and how closely they stuck to their stated strategies. Companies planning to send judges include ConocoPhillips , Citigroup , TXU , Entergy , Shell Trading at Royal Dutch Shell and the proprietary trading firm Geneva Trading. LeBlanc says the risk-adjusted results are part of what makes this contest different from those in which students compete in mock markets (At the University of Toronto, for example, students are ranked solely on the basis of how much (pretend) money they make.) Even so, there are some inevitable differences from a live trading floor. Traders in training are unlikely to even consider doing something reckless when they’re being so closely watched and graded. Nor will they dabble in algorithms, which make up an increasing proportion of trading volume. The competition is also limited to highly liquid listed products, like oil futures, rather than over-the-counter energy derivatives, like swaps. LeBlanc says his main mission isn’t to mimic reality but to drive home to would-be energy traders the fact that prospective employers are not looking to hire speculators, but people who can reduce their risk. “I’ve been around people who were gunslingers,” LeBlanc says, “and management would say ‘That’s too much risk.’” UQ
Q CME Group Trading Challenge 2016 http://www.cmegroup.com/education/trading_challenge.html CME Group's Trading Challenge is a complimentary four-week electronic trading competition where teams of undergraduate and graduate students can trade a variety of CME Group products from multiple asset classes in a simulated trading environment on a real-time professional trading platform provided by CQG. Top ranking students will be eligible for cash prizes and exclusive CME Group experiences. This annual competition has grown each year - with 226 schools from 37 countries and over 500 teams competing in 2015. The Trading Challenge is a unique chance for students to learn hands-on techniques for trading futures. Teams must consist of 3 to 5 members from the same university and each must elect a student leader. Teams can participate on a student-led team or in cooperation with a faculty advisor. Advisors will have early registration access to register their teams. Please note, advisors are not permitted to participate as a member of the team during the Challenge and are ineligible to receive a prize if their team is a winner. 2016 Daily Championship Round Results 2016 CME Group Championship Round - FINAL RESULTS Congrats to the 2016 Winners! University (Country) – Team Name Final Simulated Account Balance Nanyang Polytechnic (Singapore) – Team Alpha $500,018.75 Carnegie Mellon University (U.S.) – Team Scotty Dogs of the Dow $443,430.00 Concordia University (Canada) – Team Yolo $355,750.00 University of Colorado Boulder (U.S.) – Team CU_Ugrad_1 $326,614.38 Championship Round – Daily Results 02/22-03/03 2016 Daily Preliminary Round Results http://www.cmegroup.com/education/trading_challenge/files/round-one-2016-final-results.pdf 2016 CME Group Trading Challenge FINAL Preliminary Preliminary Round - Daily Results 02/02-02/17 UQ
Q http://www.cmegroup.com/education/trading_challenge/past-challenge-winners.html Past Challenge Winners 2015 CME Group Trading Challenge Final Results CME Group’s 2015 Trading Challenge included nine contracts from six asset classes: Corn, Soybeans, Live Cattle, Crude Oil, Natural Gas, Gold, E-mini S&P 500, 10-Year U.S. Treasury Note, and EUR/USD Futures. Over 2,000 students participated from 226 schools around the world. University - Team Name Final Simulated Account Balance Ozyegin University - OzU Invest $534,672.50 University of Alabama at Birmingham - UAB Blazers $490,287.50 Boston University-Big Hero Five $474,843.13 Carnegie Mellon University - Carnegie Mellon $458,655.00 2014 CME Group Trading Challenge Final Results CME Group’s 2014 Trading Challenge included nine contracts from six asset classes: Corn, Soybeans, Live Cattle, Crude Oil, Natural Gas, Gold, E-mini S&P 500, 10-Year U.S. Treasury Note, and EUR/USD Futures. Nearly 1,600 students participated from 207 schools around the world. Congratulations to the following winning teams of the 2014 Challenge. University - Team Name Final Simulated Account Balance 1. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - Team Ocean Futures $404,652.50 2. Boston University - Team Lighthouse $374,535.00 3. Georgia State University - Team Panthers FX Traders $361,150.00 4. Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation - Team Forex Traders $354,770.00 2013 CME Group Trading Challenge Final Results CME Group’s 2013 Trading Challenge included three contracts from two asset classes: Crude Oil, Gold and Corn Futures. Participation included nearly 1,500 students from 179 schools around the world. Congratulations to the following winning teams of the 2013 Challenge. University - Team Name Final Simulated Account Balance 1. Rice University – Rice JJRS $372,325.00 2. Polytechnic Institute of NYU – The Masterminds $319,625.00 3. Escuela de Ingenieria de Antioquia – MONTEROJO $317,640.00 4. Georgia Institute of Technology – M.I.R. $316,920.00 UQ
Page 9 Q http://www.cmegroup.com/education/trading_challenge/files/2016-trading-challenge-rules.pdf © 2014 CME Group. All rights reserved. General Rules for Trading • Beginning account balances : - Preliminary Round: $100,000 - Final Round: $250,000 (Preliminary round results do not impact the final round starting account balance. All team accounts are reset after the preliminary round .) UQ
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5107 Q A Review of "Oil 101" by Morgan Downey Posted by Heading Out on February 17, 2009 - 10:24am Topic: Supply/Production Tags: book review, oil market, oil production, refineries [list all tags] I read a lot of books. (A quick measure comes up with more than 10 ft of shelf space filled with books relating to the topic of peak oil and alternate fuels – not counting the books that deal with drilling and other aspects of technology that relate more to my day job). Some of these are quite expensive. Jean Grove’s book that I have recently been quoting, is now discounted to around $350, and several of the alternate fuels books are well over $100. But price doesn't mean necessarily useful and of my collection only 8 books sit on my desk. Today I added another to that rather select group. It is Morgan Downey’s “Oil 101”. It sits on my desk, not because it gives me a lot of the in-depth detail that many of the stories that I write require, but rather it is because it has a vast reservoir of the small, but invaluable, snippets that provide that useful addenda that help in understanding a story. It is, I suppose, in the format of the book I would have written if I had tied together the Tech Talk series. It differs from them, however, both in being focused not just on oil, but also in explaining more of the financial matters that play such a significant part in the price we pay for oil and thereafter for the gas that goes into the tank. The book gives enough explanation of the overall oil production business to be highly useful, without the greater detail that would, on campus, require a second, more detailed course in any one of the component parts. Anyone dropping into the discussions at The Oil Drum or Bit Tooth Energy arrives in the midst of a group that has, as a general observation, some underlying knowledge of oil, what it is, where it is found, how it is extracted, refined and then marketed. Because these sites have evolved, over time, as the audience has grown, so, while there are occasional explanatory pieces, in the main the knowledge becomes more and more assumed. But if you don’t know, for example, the relative production rates of the OPEC nations, relative to the producers outside OPEC, or even which countries are which, it becomes more difficult to follow the discussion. For those of you who fall into this category, this is the sort of book that is really useful. Because, without going into a lot of detail, it is that level of information that fills its pages. The information is given in tables, and with lots of pictures. (Small caveat – while small pictures work well on a Web site where they can be increased in size, they don’t work well at all in a book, where it is hard sometimes to make out what the picture is trying to show). The book follows the pattern of oil starting with what types there are, how it was formed and where it is found. It explains with a couple of simple pictures the concept of the kerogen, oil and gas windows and then goes on to explain, from the rock formations in which it is found, how the oil and gas can be recovered. Given the amount of material that the book covers, the specific detail on any one process is sparse, but with the underlying knowledge that is provided, it then becomes possible for example, to follow a more detailed description of the steps that are taken in trying to improve production from a well driven into a shale gas field, or why we are interested in the relative production rates and lifetimes of horizontal and vertical wells. This is useful not just to the neophyte. Just the other day when I was writing a piece on the future price of oil, I wanted to know the current percentage of world production that OPEC produced and bingo, there on Figure 5.4 was the number, 43%. The story went on to look at the demand for petroleum products as it fluctuates over the year, and there again was Figure 13.2, showing the fluctuation in vehicle miles driven, by month. (Being me, I then went back to the source he cited to get the current data, but it barely differed from what Morgan Downey had written). The production of oil is shifting to the use of heavier, and sourer crudes. This will impact refinery use, construction and re-construction and the book provides an underlying appreciation for what we write about to explain why, for example, Saudi Arabia needs to build a new refinery to process the oil from the Manifa field. At the level of basic understanding (the role of a 101 course), there is enough information in this book to gather how a refinery works, and, again, to then be able to understand some of the more erudite parts of the discussion on refinery use or by Robert Rapier on gas prices. While providing some background to the debate on current world oil reserve calculations, he does not take a specific position within it. Given the nature of the debate, that is perhaps wise. In a perhaps more prescient mode, he ends the book with chapters on the effect of regulation (a very likely new thrust by an Administration stocked with those who look favorably on the California experience) and on oil price and how the oil market works. If I wanted to pick a nit or two, he did miss the recent change in the SEC rules (pdf) defining proved reserves, but then if he hadn’t maybe there would have been less of a role for the rest of us to play. It also only happened this last month, and while this book is almost that up to date, it is not quite. Yet a lot of the information is relatively timeless. And it would, moreover, be straining to find criticism for what is meant to provide only an underlying level of knowledge to the game. As it is, there is enough information provided that it will help me remember facts and sources, and thus to explain issues in a fundamental way, so that the book will stay on my desk, and start to look as worn as some of the others. A Review of "Oil 101" by Morgan Downey Share | Show without comments | PDF version Related articles (automatically generated) Book Review: Oil 101 (April 28, 2009) 150 Years of Plenitude: The Story of Oil (August 27, 2009) An Idea: Vehicle Efficiency Market (March 27, 2009) OPEC Meets as Oil Demand Turns the Corner (September 9, 2009) Book Review - Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil (September 22, 2009) 47 comments | Comments can no longer be added to this story. ... ... UQ I haven't seen the book myself, but the table of contents of this book seems like it covers a lot--both production and financial aspects: Part One: Oil fundamentals Chapter 1: A brief history of oil Chapter 2: A crude oil assay Chapter 3: Components of oil liquids Chapter 4: Chemistry of oil Chapter 5: Industry overview Chapter 6: Exploration and production Chapter 7: Refining Chapter 8: Standards Chapter 9: Finished products Chapter 10: Petrochemicals Chapter 11: Transporting oil Chapter 12: Storage Chapter 13: Seasonality Chapter 14: Reserves Chapter 15: Environmental regulations Chapter 16: New engine technologies Part Two: Oil markets Chapter 17: Oil prices Chapter 18: Forward oil markets - futures and swaps Chapter 19: Forward oil markets - options Chapter 20: Managing oil price risk
buy low sell high, stay away from tuesday 4:30/wednesday 10:30 reports, buying dips is easier than shorting because of random opec rumors/news and strict risk management....all you need to know about oil, fundamentals don't matter