How to become an energy trader in 2026

Every week I get a version of the same email. "I want to be an energy trader. Where do I start?" This is the answer I've wanted to write for ten years. It's longer than a tweet and shorter than a book, but if you read it carefully, it will save you about three years of trial and error.

I've been in energy markets for twenty-five years, first as a trader at Shell and Gazprom Marketing & Trading, then as a senior executive at ICIS and Global Head of Energy at Refinitiv. I've sat on the desk, hired for the desk and built the data products the desk uses. So when I tell you what gets people in, and what keeps them out, it isn't speculation.

What energy traders actually do

Before we talk about how to break in, let's be precise about the job. An energy trader buys and sells exposure to the price of an energy commodity, physical (a cargo of LNG, a barrel of crude, a megawatt-hour of German baseload power) or financial (a futures contract, a swap, an option). The trader's job is to make money for the firm by taking positions whose expected value, net of risk, is positive.

That's it. That's the whole thing. Everything else (the analytics, the screens, the relationships) is in service of that one outcome. If you remember nothing else from this article, remember that.

There are three broad categories of energy trading job, and the path into each is meaningfully different:

• Physical trading at majors and trading houses: Shell, BP, Vitol, Trafigura, Mercuria, Glencore. You trade real molecules: cargoes, pipelines, terminals.
• Financial / derivatives trading at investment banks, hedge funds and prop shops: Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citadel, DRW and a long tail of specialised commodity hedge funds.
• Utility / merchant trading at producers and retailers: RWE, EDF, Uniper, Centrica, Statkraft, the regional US gencos. You hedge generation or load and run a smaller proprietary book on top.

The skills overlap, but the cultures, comp structures and entry routes are different. Pick a lane early. You can switch later, but not before you've earned the right to.

The four realistic entry points in 2026

1. The graduate scheme

Still the cleanest route in. Every major energy trader and most banks run a structured 12 to 24 month rotation. You'll typically rotate through scheduling/operations, risk, analytics and at least one trading desk. At the end you either get placed on a desk or you don't.

Realistic targets: BP Trading & Shipping, Shell Energy, TotalEnergies Trading, Equinor, Vitol, Trafigura, Mercuria, Hartree, Gunvor, Glencore. Bank-side: Goldman Sachs Commodities, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Macquarie. Utility-side: RWE Supply & Trading, EDF Trading, Statkraft, Uniper, Vattenfall.

What gets you in: a STEM or quantitative finance degree from a target school, a clear narrative about why energy, evidence that you can think in probabilities (poker, sports betting or options trading on your own account counts as a feature not a bug, mention it) and one good story about a time you took a calculated risk and were wrong.

2. The analyst / strategist back door

This is the route I'd recommend for ~70% of people who ask me. Join a specialist energy data and intelligence firm (Wood Mackenzie, S&P Global Commodity Insights, ICIS, Argus, Energy Aspects, Rystad, Aurora) as an analyst. Spend two to three years becoming the person on the team who can answer any question about your commodity. Then move to a trading firm as a fundamentals analyst on a desk. Then, if you want it badly enough, transition to a trading seat.

This path is slower, but it builds genuine market knowledge: the kind that makes you valuable for forty years instead of four. The traders I respect most came in this way.

3. The quant route

If you have a strong quantitative background (physics PhD, applied maths, computational finance, a serious software engineering background) you can go directly to a quant role on an energy desk at a bank, a hedge fund (Citadel, Millennium, DE Shaw, Squarepoint, Capula's commodity book) or a prop shop (DRW, IMC, Optiver's commodity desks). The work is closer to systematic trading than fundamentals, but the comp ramp is the steepest in the industry.

What gets you in: clean technical interviews, a portfolio of real projects on GitHub and the ability to talk fluently about why a particular spread might be mean-reverting. A side note: do not lie about your Python. Everyone interviews live now.

4. The lateral / operations move

If you're already in the energy industry (a power engineer, a refinery process engineer, an LNG operations lead, a carbon project developer) you have a real advantage. You understand the physical asset. Almost no one on the desk does. Many traders hire from operations because they're tired of training people who don't know what a turbine does.

If this is you: build relationships internally, get yourself on the trading floor on rotation and start showing up to the morning meeting with one good question per week. The people who break through this way always do it the same way: they make themselves useful before they ask for the seat.

The skills that actually matter

I've interviewed hundreds of traders. The successful ones almost always have these traits, and the unsuccessful ones almost always lack at least two of them.

1. A live-fire risk instinct

Trading is a probabilistic discipline. People who have only ever played safe games (academic exams, structured internships, optimised CVs) are at a disadvantage. People who have voluntarily taken real risks (started a small business, run a poker bankroll, traded options on their own account, competed seriously at something with a clear scoreboard) are at an advantage. This is the single most underrated factor.

2. Mental arithmetic and unit fluency

Energy is a unit-conversion nightmare. Therms to MMBtu. Barrels to tonnes. EUR/MWh to GBP/therm. If a desk asks you "what's a Henry Hub move from $3.20 to $3.45 worth on 50,000 MMBtu/d for the rest of the month, given 14 days left?" you should be able to give an answer in fifteen seconds without a calculator. Practise this. Every day. It is genuinely table stakes.

3. Communication under uncertainty

You will be asked your view when you don't have one, and you will be asked your view when you have one but it's wrong. Both moments matter. Saying "I don't know but here's what I'd need to see to take a view" is a senior answer. Bluffing is a junior mistake that ends careers.

4. Resilience

You will be wrong. A lot. Often loudly, often expensively. The traders who last are not the ones who are right most often. They are the ones who recover fastest from being wrong. Cultivate this before you need it.

5. Genuine curiosity about the physical world

Why does a German nuclear outage matter for French summer power? Why does a Panama Canal drought widen the Atlantic LNG basis? Why is West Texas crude trading at a discount to Brent and not the other way around? If these questions make you lean in rather than zone out, you have the right brain for this. If they don't, do something else. Life is short.

The skills that don't matter as much as people think

• The CFA. Useful in equity research; almost ignored on a commodity desk. If you have time, do it; if you have to choose, learn the physical market instead.
• An MBA. Helps for utility and corporate trading, mostly irrelevant for prop and bank trading. Don't take on £100k of debt to get it unless you have a specific employer in mind.
• Fluency in five programming languages. Solid Python and SQL are enough for most desk-side analyst and trader roles. The exception is the quant route, where you genuinely need to be a strong engineer.
• Networking events. The good ones (commodity trading society dinners, niche conferences) are useful; the generic ones are noise. One real conversation with a working trader is worth fifty business cards.

What to read before your first interview

If you walk into a graduate scheme final round having read these, you will be in the top 10% of candidates by preparation:

• The World for Sale, Javier Blas & Jack Farchy. The story of physical commodity trading. Read it twice.
• Oil 101, Morgan Downey. The single best primer on the oil market.
• Trading Natural Gas, Fletcher Sturm. Old but still the clearest explanation of how a gas desk thinks.
• The IEA's World Energy Outlook, latest edition. Skim. Pick three things you disagree with. Be ready to explain why.
• One year of the FT energy section. Daily. This is non-negotiable.

The honest version of what to expect

If you get in, your first two years will be unglamorous. You'll do the morning P&L, run the position file, fix the pricing curves and get yelled at for things that aren't your fault. This is the price of admission and it is non-negotiable. The traders who skip this stage never properly understand the risk system, and it shows for the rest of their career.

By year three or four, if you've made yourself indispensable, you'll get a small book: a book in spread, a book in a niche product, a book that nobody on the senior desk wants. Take it. Your job in year three is not to make money; it is to lose less than you should given the size of the book. Demonstrate risk discipline before you demonstrate edge.

By year five, if you're still there, you'll know whether this is your career. Some people love it forever. Others discover they were in love with the idea, not the job. Both are fine, but find out at year five, not year fifteen.

The traders who last are not the ones who are right most often. They are the ones who recover fastest from being wrong.

Where to start this week

If you want to be an energy trader, here is what I'd do this week, in order:

1. Pick a commodity. Just one. Crude, gas, power, carbon. Doesn't matter, pick the one you find most interesting and commit to it for at least the next year.
2. Set up a Bloomberg-equivalent free data stack: TradingView for prices, the EIA / Eurostat / ENTSOG / GIE websites for fundamentals, the IEA for outlook.
3. Start a one-page weekly journal. Every Sunday, write what happened in your commodity, what you think happens next, and why. Date it. After six months, read it back. This will teach you more about markets than any book.
4. Read Oil 101 and The World for Sale.
5. Find one working trader on LinkedIn whose career you admire. Send a polite, specific message, not "can I pick your brain", but "I noticed you traded the German auction in 2023; I'm trying to understand X, would you have ten minutes?" The quality of your message determines the response rate, not the seniority of the recipient.

None of this is glamorous. None of it requires you to be in the right city or know the right people. It requires you to do the work, week after week, while the people who say they want this scroll twitter. The compounding is enormous.

If you do this for a year, you will be more prepared than 95% of graduate scheme applicants. If you do it for three, you will be more prepared than half the people already on the desk. That is the whole game.

One last thing

Energy markets are entering one of the most consequential decades in their history. The transition from fossil fuel to electrified energy is the single largest reallocation of capital ever attempted. The traders who understand both worlds, who can read a gas curve and a CfD auction, who understand barrels and battery economics, will be enormously valuable for the rest of their careers.

That is the opportunity. The path is open. Whether you walk it is up to you.

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