Base Oil Desk

Wow it was exciting...A new desk . completely new product and hell lot of new things...
I was asked to be in Base Oil trading desk for 2 weeks to cover for someone going for leave. well it was a hell of a takeover. i was fully covering LPG for soemtime as my collegue was on leave and on the day she came back from Australia i was asked to move out to Base Oil to learn about that desk. It was a mess!!! Well the first two days was a bit tight as i was trying hopelessly to figure out the base oil trading and operations but slowly i could get hold of it..The main reason for this difficulty is that Base Oil is a completely new product and tradfing is done differently and also the trading book is abit big close to 15 million + .i should say..so you should be very carefull in balancing it...other wise u can screw it up.. Myself and my good friend and trader mr Richard lost almost 0.3 million in atrade a couple of week back where we did with a greek trading house. that was a bloody blow. I wont forget it..0.3 mLn in just one day flat out of ur book. The head was spinning fr quite sometime before u could grasp it and i thought that was the end.. But we came out of it and was able to cover up some amount of the loss... But that was a lesson. Dont be greedy. We were supposed to make close to 0.5 mln in that trade. that was a big punt.and we went forit.. Never again..Slow down thats the mantra. big money will come slowely.. Base oil was good in that sense.. Not much heavy counter parties eventhough some chinese parties were there.
One thing abt chinese counterparties is that thy are very arrogant. They know they have a big population to chew abt the entire petrochemical we brign there and so they command their premium. And we are helpless and my personal exp is that chinese banks are dodgy.. Well but it was good...Tomorrow or day after i am back again to LPG desk. And next week i am off for a 5 day residential operations workshop organised by shell. It will be real fun with the new recruits of the last 6 months all around the world in shell gathering in singapore for a 5 day residential workshop where u r taught the basics of syndications and shipping. There are guys and ofcours gals from Shell Middle east/japan/Australia /China and the rest. Looking forward to it ..lets see...
As of now i am logging off....and for a good night sleep ....