The desks paying at the top of the market now want commercial instinct and quantitative literacy together, not one or the other. The searches taking longest are the ones where the brief was written for the trader of five years ago.
A note from Matt. Welcome to the first edition of this newsletter.
For five years I led front office recruitment for bp's global trading and shipping business out of Singapore. Traders, analysts, originators, structurers, operators, risk, legal, compliance, commercial leadership. Having been on the client side of search for some time, the firms I worked with generally fell into two camps. Hyper-specialists with deep knowledge of one narrow desk and no understanding of the broader ecosystem. Or functional generalists who could not speak the language of the trading floor and the energy and commodities industry. I rarely found a search partner who could do both.
That gap is where Rhumbl sits, and it is what this newsletter is about. Every month I will share what I am hearing across the desks, the functions behind them, and the critical commercial roles inside trading organisations. Singapore-centric, but with reach into the broader region, the Middle East, and Africa, since most regional heads sitting here are running businesses that span all three.
Commercial instinct is no longer enough on its own
The desks paying at the top of the market are no longer hiring on commercial instinct alone. They want commercial instinct alongside quantitative literacy. Genuine market judgement next to comfort with the data layer behind the trade. The candidates who bridge those two worlds convincingly are not new, but the volume of firms competing for them has changed materially.
What this means in practice is that the searches taking longest right now are the ones where the brief is written for the trader of five years ago. The desks that move quickest are the ones whose brief reflects what the role actually requires today. If you are recruiting at this level and your last hire was a few years back, the spec is worth revisiting before the search starts.
The functions behind the trade are being taken seriously again
The biggest shift I am tracking inside trading organisations is not on the front office. It is in the seriousness with which the functions around the desk are now being hired. Risk, legal, compliance, middle office, commercial control. These roles used to absorb more generalist functional backgrounds. They are now being run as proper searches, with proper specs, against candidates with genuine sector depth.
The driver for strong talent in this space is straightforward. Trading houses know that the infrastructure behind the trade is where much of the execution risk lives. A weak middle office is not a back office problem, it is a P&L problem that surfaces when you least expect it; the recent regrade spike cost a lot of desks significantly, a stinging reminder of how directly robust risk infrastructure feeds commercial performance in volatile markets.
If you are building out these functions, the candidates worth knowing about are not on the open market. They are sitting in the firms you already know, doing the job well.
The Hormuz dynamic and what it is doing to retention
When markets move as hard as they have moved this quarter, experienced people become more valuable inside the firms they are already in. Traders, cargo ops teams, risk leaders, and origination talent with deep knowledge of physical flows through the Hormuz corridor are not easily replaced.
The flip side of a quarter like this is balance sheets. Volatility on this scale plays to the trading houses' book, and several are sitting on the strongest balance sheets and deepest cash reserves they have held in years. Houses in that position do not sit still, they use it to go after their top targets, and they move aggressively when they do. That reframes the retention question for everyone else: the risk is no longer a rival matching a number, it is a well-capitalised competitor willing to pay up to take your best people while the window is open. If you are the one being hunted, the time to lock people in is now; if you are the one doing the hunting, the same window applies.
On my radar this month
A few specific watch points across the energy and commodities trading market.
LNG cargo operations talent is the function I have been asked about most this quarter. The rerouting of Middle Eastern flows has tightened the available expertise across Asia, and the firms most exposed to it are the ones moving fastest. If this profile is on your roadmap, it is worth a conversation now.
Compliance leadership inside commodity trading houses continues to be a difficult hire. The roles require somebody who understands the technical trade as well as the regulatory environment, and that combination is not easy to find at senior level. We are doing live work in this space and the picture I am building of who is out there is reasonably detailed.
Quant and physical analyst hiring is shifting fast, and the boundary between the two is narrowing. Now add the scramble to fold AI infrastructure into the analytics ecosystem, with models, data engineering and human judgement all competing for the same org chart. The desks getting ahead are the ones rethinking how they structure analytics talent end to end, including how technical AI and tech talent is stitched into the wider team, not just adding headcount.
Sign-off
Trading, the functions that keep it running, and the commercial leadership above it. That whole ecosystem around the desk is where I focus. If you are hiring into any of it, I am easy to reach.