It's July 2026 & everyone wants to hire commodities traders. Traders can afford to be fussy
There are not many jobs where you might be hired by a bank, or a hedge fund, or an electronic trading firm, family office, specialist trading house, or a supplier of the underlying product. Commodities trading is this area. And, in the second half of 2026, top commodities traders are being feted by just about everyone.
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Commodities headhunters say the hiring market is unusually busy for this time of year. "Hiring is usually busiest in the first quarter," says Ross Gregory, partner and head of commodities at Omerta Group, a Kingsley Gate company, in New York. "This year there was more hiring in Q2 and now it's continuing into Q3."
The Strait of Hormuz was first closed in late February, prompting high intraday volatility for most commodities. Since then, hedge funds in particular have got to grips with the new reality. They are hiring, says Gregory.
We've listed some of the recent hires here and here, but they don't do justice to the buildout going on across the market. As the Financial Times noted in June, Citadel is the hedge fund granddaddy of commodities trading, followed by Millennium, Balyasny and assorted others. Even before this year's geopolitical drama, hedge funds were building commodities desks. Brevan Howard, for example, hired a team with the promise of committing $750m to the market in late 2023. Verition hired 10 high profile traders at the end of last year. Schonfeld hired BNP Paribas' top commodities trader Arthur Goossens in February. SquarePoint has been hiring. So have electronic trading firms like Jane Street, DRW, Optiver and CTC.
There is commodities trading and commodities trading, though. Not all employers are equal. In some cases, experienced traders are joining hedge funds and then bouncing out again. As we reported yesterday, many of Brevan Howard's senior commodities hires seem to have left again. We also understand that James Hutchison, a Millennium portfolio manager who joined Verition in December 2025, may have moved on, along with Yudong Liu who joined Verition in January from Gunvor. Neither Verition nor Hutchison or Liu responded to our requests for a comment.
Human liquidity in the commodities market is likely to continue until the end of the year. Peter Henry, a New York-based commodities headhunter at HW Anderson, says firms that are hiring in the space have also been taking advantage of the fact that oil traders made less money in the past two years than during the volatility of COVID and the early days of the Ukraine war. Once deferred bonuses awarded during those crises rolled off, this made traders cheaper to move, says Henry. Instead of paying $7m-$10m, you could get oil traders for $1m-$2m back in January, he says. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz put a stop to that.
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