Hi! Please find here my consulting services proposal, based on my 14+ years experience in commodity trading and risk management.
Whaaat’s that? Producing electricity from various energy sources, gasoline from oil or biomass, and oilseed from grain are not easy tasks. On top of these challenges, the physical economy faces constant uncertainty—market volatility, extreme weather, and, particularly today in 2025 ever-changing trade policies.
Know-how and ground experience are essential, but endless questions persist. Some challenges call for concrete action, others for an adhoc pricing model or monitoring risk key indicators. In some cases, well-structured arguments alone can resolve the debate.
What’s the best way to solve these kinds of questions, where the market and the physical world are sometimes intricately intertwined? Somewhere between pure IA and pure intuition lies a balanced middle ground. There’s no easy answer, but I’m here to help you.
In terms of methodology, I prioritize a thorough analysis of the problem at hand. It’s often the case that we don’t initially aim to solve the right problem. Note that I believe that many problems can be solved quickly when well thought out.
Following this, I emphasize a comprehensive analysis of available data and its quality. This step is crucial and should be undertaken as early as possible.
Finally comes the phase of implementing the solution, involving programming, analysis and interpretation of the results. Note that I will always adapt to the programming languages used in your teams and the legacy tools.
This stage is typically straightforward when the preceding steps have been well-executed. From there, you get valuable insights for you to make informed decisions.
In all situations, I think it worth spending time on clarifying the problem, along with the strategies for solving it, be it the ones implemented or the feasible afterward. I definitely prefer explainability and interpretation over a “black box” solution.
When needed, the ultimate step is deployment, monitoring, management, and maintenance of models in production environments. Tech savvy, I can use the leading-edge available tools as much as the time-tested ones. Whether in terms of algorithms, programming, whether in term of cloud technology, data storage, data processing and real-time data pipelines, I will always propose pragmatic solutions in a desired environment. Customer centric and value driven, I don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. A simple approach can often be effective in many problems. But a more complex solution may be needed, sometimes!
Note that, thinking further, I will contemplate a more human dimension in my methodology. It is somehow the ’empathy’ I mention above, but I develop further. While I had already emphasized the importance of thorough analysis considering all these keys, I believe it is above all important to acknowledge our human biases. For example, as an engineer, I tend to approach problem-solving through engineering methods, which may distort the problem definition itself. I believe this perspective opens the door to a new kind of creativity, which is welcomed in today’s AI era.
Commodity markets experiences: electricity, gas and oil, dry bulk, grain and oilseed, cotton, freight truck
Programming languages habits: C#, C++, SAS, Python, SQL
Some of cloud technologies : Databrics, Snowflake, Docker/Kubernetes…
Used to Power BI (and also Tableau some time ago) for visualization tool,
Used to version control systems, Github, Azure devOps for code collaboration and project management
