Candidate 0417

Um, so junior year I ran the energy sleeve of our student investment fund. It was small, but it was, like, real money, it was alumni money, and it was mine to manage. And I had this long natural gas position going into a cold snap and the forecast just... flipped. Over a weekend. We lost about eighteen percent of the sleeve in two trading days.

Honestly, the first night I did not handle it great. I kept refreshing the price, like, at two a.m., which, that doesn't change anything.

But the next morning I made myself sit down before the meeting and write two lists. What I knew, and what I'd just been believing. And the believing list was longer than I wanted it to be.

So I walked into the meeting and I said that out loud. I said, here's what I got wrong, here's what's still true, and here's the size I'd hold now, which was smaller. We cut half. The other half we held, and it came back some, not all. But the thing I kept was the two lists. I still do that.

So before college I worked at my grandfather's feed and farm supply store, down in the Valley, in Weslaco. And you learn pretty fast that nobody tells you what they're going to buy. Like, a farmer comes in and he's talking about his daughter's quinceañera, and he's talking about the rain, and if you listen, you can tell he's not planting the second crop.

And then you hear it from three or four guys in the same week and you go, okay, we're not going to need the seed order we placed.

My grandfather called it, um, listening to the counter. I didn't have a word for it. I think about it with markets now, like, the price is what people did, but the counter is what they're about to do.

I did get it wrong once. I thought everybody was nervous about a drought and it was really just one loud guy. So I try to count, not just feel.

Okay. So, the first thing I'd say is the hedge isn't a vote against the project. Like, the company's made a fifteen year bet that the world wants this gas. My job is to make sure that if the price, or the policy, goes the other way for a few years, the project survives long enough to be right.

Um, I think the hard part is personal, honestly. If I'm on that desk I'd probably want the project to win. And I'd have to be okay with my hedge making money on the days that's, like, bad news for the building.

And I'd want to understand who's on the other side. A buyer in Japan or Germany signing a twenty-year contract, they're hedging too, they're scared of a different thing than we are.

I don't think I'd know the right ratio. I'd want to ask somebody who's been through a cycle.

Last summer I interned on a scheduling team at a midstream company. And there was this one week a pipeline nomination was off, like, the volume was wrong, and it would've been a penalty. It wasn't my error, it was in a handoff between two people.

I caught it because I'd been asking Maria, she'd been doing it like twenty years, I'd been asking her a million questions about why the numbers looked the way they did on Mondays.

So I didn't fix it myself. I brought it to her and she fixed it in like four minutes, and then she showed me why.

At the end of the summer my manager thanked me for catching it, and I said, honestly, Maria caught it, I just knew who to ask. And I meant that.

Why trading. Um. I grew up hearing about the gas price at dinner, like, it decided whether my dad had overtime. So it never felt abstract.

I think I want to be the person on a desk that people trust when it's moving fast. Not the loudest. The one who already did the homework.

Five years, I'd want to own a book. Something regional, where knowing the people actually matters.

I don't totally know yet what I'd be responsible for beyond my own P&L. That's, I mean, that's something I'd want to figure out.