Nick Banfield (Geography, 1988, County) talks about how his geography degree set him up for a successful thirty year career in commodity trading.

"I have been privileged to have enjoyed a wonderful career since graduating from Lancaster in July 1988. It has always been in commodity trading but essentially in oil trading. Throughout my career I heard comments like " geography is just a soft subject " or " you will not go far in this industry with that ". How wrong they were. Let me explain why . You only have to look at how I started back in January 1988 when I went down to London for my fourth and last interview at Philipp Brothers to get on to the Graduate Trainee Trader Scheme. I was one of five competing for the placement : one was an economist from Oxford, one was from Sweden doing a PhD, one was fluent in farsi (iranian) and one was a mathematician. Yours truly was a geography undergraduate from Lancaster. I felt then that I would not be offered the job against that competition.

I was the last to to be interviewed and I was facing the Head of Metals, The Head of Softs (cocoa, coffee, sugar etc) and the Company Secretary. They were obviously tired and hit me with a question which involved being put in a position where I was supposedly down 20 million pounds with my position. They wanted to know how I would manage that loss and what actions I would take. Trying not to panic I replied: " I would never have got into that position in the first place !" One of the managers loved the answer, but the other was angry with my arrogance. In short, I got the job and I never saw those other four interviewees again. The moral of the story is to never underestimate yourself coming from Lancaster and never underestimate what degree you have done. Lancaster University won that night and they only took me.

My first assignment was extraordinary. I was sent out to Ghana, Nigeria and Ivory Coast as an analyst which involved spending two weeks at a time up country in the bush travelling around about 200 farms and collecting data to see how the crop was growing. Each time I would then fly on to the next country and then the next and this would continue for about nine months of the year. After each trek I would telex the data back to London for the traders to interpret the data and update their forecasts. This was a rough job and involved a lot of hardship. There was nothing glamorous about living in terrible conditions, being eaten by mosquitos and avoiding all the poisonous snakes under the sun. But I learnt to toughen up and when I was back in London I started to learn about how the traders worked as a team and managed the book. Cocoa and soft commodities were dying at that time and when Sadaam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, I decided to switch commodities and joined Caltex (Chevron today) to become a junior oil trader. Oil was exploding.

Caltex, formerly a joint venture between Chevron and Texaco, was an American oil major focused 100 percent on trading East of Suez. After trading crude and LPG for three years I was posted to Bahrain to become their Trading Co-ordinator for the Middle East. I was responsible for all their trading activities in the Middle East and Indian sub-continent. I worked alone and reported to the London and Singapore offices, but it was in Bahrain that I learnt about product specifications, refinery operations, contracts, and above all another culture of a part of the world I had never visited, let alone lived. My children were both born in Bahrain and I thoroughly enjoyed my four years there. I learnt so much and it gave me a foundation or a platform of knowledge from which to blossom. The contacts I made were never lost and stood me for the rest of my career. In 1997 Caltex posted me to Singapore where I stayed and lived until 2018. My role there was as a fuel oil trader working with one of the biggest teams in Asia and this was yet another learning curve. But I only worked in that team until I was offered the same job , but for better remuneration, at the French Major called Elf known today as Total.

It was at Elf that my trading expertise in both derivatives and physical trading took off. They taught and encouraged me to take on more personal risk in my own book . It was a much smaller office compared to Caltex and comprised of only 12 people. Today they have 500 which shows how much Asia has exploded. We fought many battles in the market and the stress at times was very painful. Oil trading is not a 9-5 job. You were expected to be on your phone through the night and often you could be trading the market at 3 am because of the time zone in Singapore. There was no job security, but you were rewarded extremely well if you succeeded. I retired at 50 totally burnt out and now very happy to be living back in the UK. It has taken me several years to adjust and looking back I can say that I did not like the person I had become by the end. But that is part of living through thirty years as a commodity trader and what you need to understand if this is the kind of career you wish to pursue.

So, in conclusion, commodity trading is stressful, but enthralling. I loved it because every morning I woke up and I had no clue about the latest news. I listened to the BBC World Service as I prepared to go to work to get as much information as to what had happened over night and how it would affect my position. I lived through two Gulf wars, a Russian revolution, two tsunamis, a SARS pandemic and a few stock market crashes and banking crises. Everything affects the markets including politics, geophysical factors and economics and I think that is why I succeeded, because Geography was all about interpreting and explaining spatial distributions. 75 percent of trading is in the analysis . The other 25 percent is buying or selling and managing one's position. As graduates from Lancaster you come from a top ten University and should never lack any confidence in your own ability. I look forward to the day I can return to that great University again and explain in much more detail what it all entailed and have a beer with you all !"