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So, we would really appreciate hearing your opinions about, and experiences with, the various products and vendors that support energy and commodity trading activities around the globe.  The short electronic survey won’t take you long to complete and the final report will be freely available for you to check how your views match up with others.

To begin taking our survey, please click on the following link:

www.utilipoint.com/2/2011_CTRM_VPS_TY.

We do ask that you enter your name and contact details to help us validate your response. All replies are confidential.

Note: Responses from persons employed by, or associated with E/CTRM software vendors will NOT be considered.

I don’t want to overstate my case, because we clearly have seen some technology advancement in this space over the last decade, including incremental improvements in areas such as processing speeds and to some extent, usability. Still, CTRM systems continue to look a lot they did, and user continue to interact with them very much in the same manner as they did, more than 10 years ago.

Is it possible or even practical to bring some of these consumer oriented technologies into the CTRM space?  Is there a business case for technological innovation in CTRM? Can we improve the ways deals are discovered, consummated, recorded, managed and accounted for, and in the process improve trading margins and reduce costs?

Can we improve the human machine interface (HMI) to a point where users don’t have to use mice to press a drop down selection box or use a keyboard to type data into a form on a LCD screen?  Can we leverage the technologies that underlay “massively multi-player on-line game” platforms to create better, more interactive marketplaces for commodity trading?  Can we utilize the experiences and technologies that underlay social media sites like Facebook to create virtual business environments in which not only deals, but other forms of information exchange, such as confirmations, invoices and payments flow seamlessly between and amongst counterparties?  Can we move the yet unfulfilled promise of mobile computing into CTRM and truly untether traders and trading support personnel from their desks and trading floors?  Can the “cloud” be useful in distributing applications and workloads to truly virtualize trading floors and improve collaboration across geographies, markets, and cultures?

It’s not only a question of what can technology do to improve the business of CTRM, it’s also a question of what is needed from technology suppliers to meet emerging needs in this industry over the next decade and whether innovation can better meet those needs rather than just a continuing evolution of the same basic tools.

We’re inviting market participants to express their views on these questions and more during CommodityPoint’s 2012 CTRM Technical Conferences. Our first event will be held in London in May and our second will be in Houston in July (yes, July in Houston…and yes, we know about the heat.  Don’t worry, we will have air conditioning).  We’re starting to flesh out the agendas for those events and we’re inviting the users of CTRM products to be speakers.  If you’re a user of the technologies of CTRM, we’d like to hear your ideas (as a presenter at one of our events) about what’s needed to meet the emerging business and regulatory requirements of this market and/or what can the technology providers, service companies, and even your peers, do in the area of helping to bring real innovation to this market over the next decade.

So again, if you’re interested in sharing your thoughts and ideas as a speaker at either our London or Houston event, please feel free to contact either Mark Tredway or myself for more information.  For more information about the CTRM Technical Conference Series, you can visit the events website here.

Again, I’m always impressed with the quality of students that participate in this course.  Mr. Bell and the Bauer College have created a program that attracts the best of the Business School, which in turn creates a pool of new graduates every semester that are experienced in the use of ETRM software and have a understanding of the dynamic energy markets.

I’ll provide an more detailed update of the program in the coming weeks in a CommodityAlert and IssueAlert article, but I did want to express my  appreciation to Mr. Bell and Mr. Casey for the warm reception and the very interesting conversation with them and their students.

A couple of notes regarding the video -

1) Apparently Gary had created a video blog posting about a year ago or so, but I’ve seen it only on YouTube, not on this blog site.

2) I say in the blog that we are using HD video.  We are indeed capturing the video in HD; unfortunately though, do to some software limitations, its not posted in HD…yet.

No truer thing has been said of the CommodityPoint SourceBook series, our very successful series of guides for companies that are seeking to acquire CTRM software, services, or ancillary products, and for which we continue to be peppered with queries as to how valid a specific publication is to the particular vendor or consultant in question and/or which one they should be listed in.

Perhaps this may be due to CommodityPoint’s analysts being too close to the product or that these same analysts actually formulated the names for the publications. It could also be the many, many hours of work that actually goes into creating a SourceBook, the conceptualization, the sending out of forms to vendors/service providers, the editing, and re-editing, researching the validity of content (yes, we try to make sure that fact fudging doesn’t take place), re-editing, formatting, sending for review, re-editing, formatting in PDF, formatting for the web and finally sending out to market…(whew!)… that has got us scratching our heads as to why it is that some vendors/consultants might still be confused as to what SourceBook publication is actually suitable for them and which one they should list their products and/or services in.

And so without further ado, I give you, the reader, CommodityPoint’s most definitive and simple explanation regarding the SourceBook Series.

Firstly, the term SourceBook is the actual brand name of the product family such as Coca-Cola, Ford or Sony. Under that brand, you have individual products, such as Coca-Cola Light (or Diet Coke if you’re in North America), Ford Fiesta, or Sony Walkman. The SourceBook series is a series of different publications that are the definitive guides to commodity trading software, providing the industries only up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the systems and providers servicing this dynamic and complex industry. The SourceBook is the primary tool offered by CommodityPoint to help prospective buyers of software and services in this space.

We then move to the actual publications, which would be the term used directly after SourceBook. So that would be SourceBook—CTRM Products, SourceBook—Ancillary Vendors and Products and SourceBook—Consultants and Systems Integrators.

The SourceBook—CTRM Systems

This publication provides a listing of those products and vendors that provide most or all of the core CTRM functionality in their software (contract management, deal capture, position keeping, logistics, etc.). The current version provides coverage of more than 45 CTRM products, is distributed free of charge and has established itself as the definitive resource for those companies and individuals seeking to better understand the landscape of providers and solutions, including prospective buyers of CTRM software, investors and market consultants.

The SourceBook—CTRM Systems is updated annually with the next version due for release in March 2012.

The SourceBook—Ancillary Vendors and Products

This publication focuses on products and software which, while ancillary to the core CTRM software used by commodity trading and risk management organizations, have become an increasingly critical part of the infrastructures necessary to compete in today’s markets. The current version provides coverage of more than 40 ancillary CTRM products.

The SourceBook—Ancillary Vendors and Products is updated annually with the next version due for release in June 2012.

The SourceBook—Consultants and Systems Integrators

This SourceBook covers the consultant/systems integrator landscape—companies who offer services in and around CTRM and ancillary software. For example, those firms who offer CTRM software selection or software implementation services or who may offer training services, risk management consulting or custom development services.

The SourceBook—Consultants and Systems Integrators is updated annually with the next version due for release in September 2012

In order to ensure that we continue to provide the most comprehensive resources of products or services, we do not charge for listings in any of our SourceBooks. However, in order to support their development and distribution, we do offer opportunities for companies to advertise their products or services via a quarter page ad for those with a listing in a particular SourceBook, or a larger ad for those companies that are not listed in that particular SourceBook. Each new SourceBook release is announced via e-mail to our 112,000+ IssueAlert subscribers and made available via free download of a PDF document. On average, the SourceBooks are downloaded 3,000 to 4,500 times with an expected redistribute rate of 25 percent.

To Conclude:

Although CommodityPoint’s mission is to help simplify the complexities of the commodity trading and risk management space, we do try to reserve our acronyms and contractions to actual recognized phrases. We will always strive to not confound our clients with a whole bunch of Fs & Qs when an actual explanatory title may be more becoming and welcome.

The number of times I have seen the phrase “the science is proven” when it relates to the potential impact of manmade CO2 on the Earth’s climate astonishes me. For some, the very fact that I even termed this a “debate”
above will be enough—however, do please keep reading. But let us look at whether, in fact, the science is proven and we may find that idea that the “science is proven” or, even that the majority of scientists agree, is simply not true.

The Philosophy of Science

Science, as I was taught by the professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Strathclyde as I started my Ph.D., is about creating a working hypothesis that explains all of the observable facts. This working hypothesis must be presented for peer review by the community of scientists who will attempt to find flaws in it. If no flaws are immediately found, the hypothesis may be accepted as the best hypothesis available until such time as it fails to explain a new observation. At which time, it may be amended or scrapped in favor of a new hypothesis. In this way, science and scientists are progressively working towards the ultimate hypothesis but they may never actually know if they got there. There is no such thing as a proven hypothesis. There are just accepted (temporarily) hypotheses. We all know examples of this from our schooldays such as Newton’s laws and how those were eventually modified and replaced by Einstein and others’ improved theorems. We may even have read recently how scientists may have discovered particles that appear to break Einstein’s laws.

In other words, a hypothesis is never actually “proven” and by suggesting that this is so demonstrates a misunderstanding of what science actually is and how it is properly performed.

The problem with the global warming debate is that I (or anyone) can rightly say that they observe the effects of climate change on the world. “I see it with my own eyes.” This statement is true—we do observe climate change all around us—but how this then must mean that man made CO2 is responsible is, I would argue, based on a leap of faith. The Earth’s climate isn’t static, it changes through time both globally and regionally. Such changes may be observed in our lifetime as well as the geological record (Figure 1). From a scientific perspective, over the course of our short lives about the only factual thing we can prove relative to climate is what we already know to occur—that the Earth’s climate changes.

The Key Question Then is, “Why?”

Logical reasoning suggests that, if the Earth’s climate has always changed through time (more than four billion years of it), then we must look for the mechanisms behind those changes through that entire period of time. In other words, if nothing new is occurring now, then the answer to what drives climate change must be some broad set of systemic Earth processes. We even have some ideas about what these processes are. They include things like continental configuration, ocean currents, cloud formation and cover, solar activity, and much more. It’s a very complex set of processes that are not entirely understood (i.e., the science of climate is, in fact, a long way from being “proven”).

Why, then, the focus on CO2? A gas that occupies such a minimal proportion (parts per million) of the planet’s atmosphere that logical thought would immediately discount the idea that minor fluctuations of the stuff could cause much of an issue on a global scale. We also know that in the distant past the Earth’s atmosphere contained significantly more CO2 without much of a discernable impact on temperature (Figure 1). In fact, today, our atmosphere is actually CO2 impoverished by comparison to the geologic past.

For me, it intuitively feels wrong that C02, a gas for which Mother Earth appears to have many processes to regulate it (so-called carbon sinks) could possibly be the sole culprit? And while some may react strongly to me having this doubt, please keep in mind it is doubt that helps to drive better science. We must never stop asking ourselves, “Do we have this right?
What can we do to continue to gather objective data and analysis?” This is the basis of good science.

Politics and Belief

The potential problem, as I see it, is that the question of climate change has become politicized to the point where criticisms or even critiques of analysis or data are met with an immediate dismissal or fierce opposition.
Climate science has become anything but science with believers on both sides of the debate who seek to block the publication via peer review of opposing views, attempt to discredit each other both professionally and personally, and resort to the utilization of fear making sound bites delivered via the global media. Research funding isn’t readily available to those who seek to probe the currently accepted hypotheses.

A good example of this is the recent findings by The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) published in Nature¹ magazine.
CERN has called for climate models to be changed in the light of its findings calling the findings rightly “politically sensitive.” Why? because the research shows rather definitively that cosmic rays do seed clouds in the atmosphere which impacts climate change and this requires computer climate models to be overhauled. In the press briefing from CERN regarding the experiment, they said,

“Based on the first results from CLOUD, it is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume that nucleation is caused by these vapours and water alone. It is now urgent to identify the additional nucleating vapours, and whether their sources are mainly natural or from human activities.”²

CERN built a stainless steel chamber to as accurately possible recreate the Earth’s atmosphere to test the idea that clouds may be the primary driver of global climate as opposed to CO2. It, therefore, tested the relative importance of one aspect of the factors involved in climate change outlined above. In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes demonstrated that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules which grow in Earth’s atmosphere and seed clouds, making it cloudier and cooler. While it may not disprove the idea that CO2 is responsible, it casts further doubt on that theory.

But the real story here is just how politically complex it was for CERN to fund and conduct this experiment. In an intriguing article written by Lawrence Solomon for the Financial Post, we learn the truth behind this experiment. I quote verbatim.

“The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory credence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory – they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.

The mobilization to rally the press against the Danes worked brilliantly, with one notable exception. Nigel Calder, a former editor of The New Scientist who attended that 1996 conference, would not be cowed. Himself a physicist, Mr. Calder became convinced of the merits of the argument and a year later, following a lecture he gave at a CERN conference, so too did Jasper Kirkby, a CERN scientist in attendance. Mr. Kirkby then convinced the CERN bureaucracy of the theory’s importance and developed a plan to create a cloud chamber—he called it CLOUD, for “Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets.”

But Mr. Kirkby made the same tactical error that the Danes had – not realizing how politicized the global warming issue was, he candidly shared his views with the scientific community.

“The theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century,” Mr. Kirkby told the scientific press in 1998, explaining that global warming may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth’s temperature.

The global warming establishment sprang into action, pressured the Western governments that control CERN, and almost immediately succeeded in suspending CLOUD. It took Mr. Kirkby almost a decade of negotiation with his superiors, and who knows how many compromises and unspoken commitments, to convince the CERN bureaucracy to allow the project to proceed. And years more to create the cloud chamber and convincingly validate the Danes’
groundbreaking theory.

Yet this spectacular success will be largely unrecognized by the general public for years—this column will be the first that most readers have heard of it—because CERN remains too afraid of offending its government masters to admit its success. Weeks ago, CERN formerly decided to muzzle Mr.
Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” The CERN study and press release is written in bureaucratese and the version of Mr. Kirkby’s study that appears in the print edition of Nature censored the most eye-popping graph—only those who know where to look in an online supplement will see the striking potency of cosmic rays in creating the conditions for seeding clouds.”

Continue to Test the Hypothesis

The implication that man made CO2 is causing temperature increases and that it will result in calamitous impacts for mankind has many far-reaching consequences. Regulation of CO2 emissions impacts each and every one of us and specifically our industry, including potentially higher taxes or costs and ultimately changes in lifestyle. Given that, we should be careful to be sure that these fundamental shifts in lifestyle and business processes are founded on proper science and debate. Other well-supported explanations for the observed changes in climate are emerging and they should not be rejected out of hand, but met with careful critique. The scientific method requires it.

¹ www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7361/full/nature10343.html

²http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/downloads/CLOUD_SI_press-briefing_29JUL11.pdf

The announcement last week that OpenLink Financial (OLF), one of the world’s largest CTRM solutions providers, had entered into an agreement to acquire their sometime rival (depending on the industry segment) SolArc has created quite a stir in the market. Though we’ve seen a couple of CTRM vendors change hands at the investor level in the last couple of months, including Hellman and Friedman buying into OLF, this new announcement reflects the largest acquisition of one vendor by another in this space for many years, and is a combining of two of the top five CTRM solution providers.

The announcement is less than a couple of weeks old and, as one might expect, there are a number of elements to this deal that must still be worked out. Nonetheless, I did have the opportunity to engage in a bit of Q&A with the leaders of both companies, Kevin Hesselbirg, CEO of OLF, and Brad Anderson, the founder and CEO of SolArc, to get their thoughts about what prompted the acquisition, the value of the deal for their clients, and whatever thoughts they could share about the future direction of the combined company.

Patrick Reames (PR): When is the acquisition expected to close?

Kevin Hesselbirg: We expect our acquisition of SolArc to close by the end of 2011, subject to legal and other regulatory approvals.

PR: What do you see as the primary synergies that can be expected from this combination of companies?

Mr. Hesselbirg: OpenLink and SolArc both share a culture and philosophy focused on delivering high quality, market leading solutions, which are customer driven; we are both focused on creating value for our customers.

Combining the shared values and talents of our organizations will enhance our ability to meet market trends including the convergence of physical and financial traded markets, and continue to develop leading solutions, such as our SmartETRM platform. This platform is designed to allow market participants to manage their operational and financial risk and the associated complexities of physical delivery and settlement from a single vendor.

Brad Anderson: The greatest benefit of the two companies combined will be the ability to provide our respective current and prospective customers an unparalleled, single-vendor solution for all of their commodity trading and risk management needs.

Combining the best-in-class capabilities of both companies’ products will provide customers enhanced functionality with a lower total cost of ownership.

PR: What were the primary drivers for your company in pursuing this acquisition?

Mr. Hesselbirg: Ultimately, it is our main focus to meet client needs with a more comprehensive solution and to leverage the IP of each entity as a combined unit. The additional value of SolArc as a complementary provider furthers our commitment to our customer base. The trusted vendor reputation of both companies and newly combined offering enables us to extend the footprint at existing customers, and improve overall customer satisfaction.

Furthering that, the unparalleled R&D investment of both organizations will allow us to accelerate time to market on emerging industry concerns and important new markets, benefitting both our clients and the marketplace.

Mr. Anderson: We have always focused on driving value to our customers. We believe delivering long-term customer value is the key to long-term success. The most effective and efficient path to additional value creation was to partner with a complementary provider such as OpenLink.

SolArc’s leadership position in bulk commodity physical management is the perfect match to OpenLink’s market-leading position. This value is best represented by our mutual customers.

Together, we will be better able to leverage the R&D dollars the other has already spent. This creates value for the customer and the two companies combined.

PR: What’s the leading value proposition for your company’s customers?

Mr. Hesselbirg: As a combined entity we will have an unprecedented overview of the overall market needs and will be able to maintain a global industry level conversation with the true market leaders-our customers. We will be in an ideal position to deliver value and innovation to improve operational efficiencies while reducing risk and meeting the evolving regulatory and market changes of our combined clients.

The combined entity will also position us to invest more R&D dollars than anybody else, which will enable us to continue to transform market requirements, emerging trends, and strategies into viable, valuable, best-of-breed solutions for our clients.

Mr. Anderson: We have a number of mutual customers already. These customers will benefit from better collaboration with the two companies combined, reduce vendor relationships, and simplify systems architecture with greater overall functionality.

Additionally, a customer currently benefiting from one company’s products will have the opportunity to leverage the other company’s products and their capabilities. For example, many of SolArc’s customers have significant operations in the electric power markets which SolArc does not support. OpenLink has a market-leading solution for power. Customers will benefit from the complementary nature of our offerings.

PR: Will SolArc’s RightAngle continue as a standalone product offering in the future?

Mr. Hesselbirg: While we cannot comment on future product direction at this time due to regulatory issues, we are committed to the existing roadmaps of both companies’ products.

Mr. Anderson: Yes. We are committed the existing roadmaps of both companies products. We are anticipating the delivery of our RightAngle S12 release in 2012.

PR: OpenLink and SolArc have competed for opportunities and do share capabilities (such as crude trading and physical logistics)—will there be an attempt to reconcile those capabilities/products in order to create a single CTRM product offering?

Mr. Hesselbirg: Historically we have competed on very few opportunities. We consider the merger to be extremely complimentary to both companies because we have different expertise in different areas.

Both companies/products provide best-of-breed solutions for their respective customers’ needs. Historically, we’ve each served distinct customer needs. Again, though, we cannot make forward statements about product at this time.

Mr. Anderson: There are no current plans in place for merging the products.

PR: What role will Brad Anderson play in the combined organization?

Mr. Hesselbirg: Brad will become a valuable member of the OpenLink Management Team and continue to oversee RightAngle product strategy and customer relationships.

Mr. Anderson: I’m looking forward to taking a very active role as a member of the OpenLink management team and continuing provide guidance and direction with regard to product strategies for the SolArc product lines.

PR: Will there be an immediate combining of offices/functions between the two companies?

Mr. Hesselbirg: Our priorities are to work on customer and product issues first and foremost. We have an integration team in place who will be working through issues to determine the most efficient and effective way to deliver our products and services to the marketplace.

PR: With OLF’s most recent acquisitions, the acquired companies have remained somewhat independent—is there an expectation that SolArc will continue to operate in a similar manner?

Mr. Hesselbirg: OpenLink’s philosophy has been to handle these situations as mergers, being respectful of the employees, the innovation, and the products that helped create each company’s success. This model results in a higher level of independence for the acquired company, which has previously not been the norm in the industry.

As with previous transactions, we will invest significantly after the acquisition. This strategy has allowed our previous acquisitions to grow dramatically.

PR: How well do the products (RightAngle and Endur) mesh technologically?

Mr. Hesselbirg: At this time, due to regulatory and legal obligations we have not been able to review each other platforms at the detailed level. However, both solution suites are built with technologies that facilitate interoperability, and we share customers who utilize the market leading qualities of both solutions already.

Mr. Anderson: Both products are built on technologies that allow for interoperability between platforms. We have many mutual customers that “meshed” our products together, and we expect to work closely with them to leverage their experience and reduce their support burden over time.

PR: This deal appears to be of most benefit to each company’s banking clients—what are the benefits to the combined companies’ non-banking clients?

Mr. Hesselbirg: Any of our customers engaging in both physical and financial trading activity merging logistics functionality, will benefit.

We will continue to strive to improve our capabilities through the conversion of shared vision into delivered solutions; fulfilling our clients’ increasingly complex and evolving market needs—in the markets and industries we serve. This includes Banks as well as energy and agricultural companies.

Mr. Anderson: While our banking customers will see obvious benefits, we actually have more common customers outside of banking than we do within banking. Energy and agricultural customers will benefit in the much the same way as our banking customers.

PR: What is the overlap in client bases between the two companies?

Mr. Anderson: The overlap in client base is slight, approximately less than 15% of SolArc’s current customer base and less than 5% when compared to the entire customer base of the to be combined entity.

PR: Does this acquisition expand OLF’s market reach outside of the top tier of the market, an area in which OLF has traditionally been most successful?

Mr. Hesselbirg: All of our customers are using our sophisticated solutions in extremely complex and evolving markets.

OpenLink has never viewed our go to market approach based upon a particular tier, but rather a level of sophistication to meet their business needs. We consider all of our clients to be top tier regardless of traditional metrics for determining tier such as market capitalization or revenue.

PR: Is there advantage in this acquisition in terms of OLF’s pursuit of the agricultural markets?

Mr. Hesselbirg: Both OpenLink and SolArc have been increasingly focused on improving solutions in the agricultural marketplace:

• SolArc being a first mover in the wider commercial industrial section (e.g., airlines, CPG, Manufacturing) which includes agriculture
• OpenLink having the largest number of customers in this space, through dbc (OLF’s supply chain/CTRM solution for grain producers, traders and wholesale consumers).

Therefore, neither one of us would view this combination as a change in strategy to address this important industry group.

PR: SolArc has been a market leader in innovating data/transaction visualization. Is there an expectation those capabilities will be leveraged into Endur and the other OLF products?

Mr. Anderson: Absolutely; we expect that SolArc’s experience and leadership position in the area of data visualization and usability will mature more aggressively in the combined company.

PR: Are there any anticipated synergies between RightAngle and the IRM products?

Mr. Hesselbirg: Due to regulatory and legal obligations, we’re not able to discuss product specific questions at the detailed level at this time; however, both solution suites are built with technologies that facilitate interoperability, and we share customers who utilize the market leading qualities of both solutions already.

PR: Does this acquisition move OLF closer toward a public offering?

Mr. Hesselbirg: This acquisition is a new chapter at OpenLink with our new supportive owners. As demonstrated by our recently completed transaction event with Hellman & Friedman, OpenLink has never had a problem attracting investor interest in our growth platform and our vision for the marketplace.

An IPO is just a different variation of a financing vehicle and we would make a decision on that step if it made sense to so do it. At this point in time, we have no plans to pursue new capital investors.

CommodityPoint’s View of This Transaction

With limited client overlap, there should be little pressure from the combined company’s customer base to merge the Endur and RightAngle product lines, allowing OLF to continue to operate SolArc as a somewhat independent entity, much as they have with the IRM and dbcSmart acquisitions. While on the surface this strategy would seem not to create great operational efficiencies, experience has shown that attempting to force-fit and merge acquired E/CTRM technologies into a singular product line has rarely, if ever, yielded significant positive benefit; in fact, such strategies generally lead to increased customer dissatisfaction and significant loss of clients for the merged entity.

In our view, the greatest benefit of this acquisition will be a sharing of knowledge and experience between the two companies. Each has a long history in this market and has developed market leading capabilities—OLF in the areas of multi-commodity trading, risk management and analytics, and SolArc in the area of bulk commodity trading and logistics. The ability to leverage capabilities and resources across the two platforms should ultimately create ever improving offerings from both, enabling the combined company to win new clients that individually they might have otherwise lost to their competition.

Peter and I teamed up to undertake sponsored research into the hedge funds that appeared to be entering trading and discovered that funds were rife across the complex in equities, debt, derivative trading and much more. The ground breaking report was issued on a timely basis as interest grew in why energy prices were accelerating and higher. A directory of funds followed and our book Energy & Environmental Hedge Funds – The New Investment Paradigm (Wiley, 2006). We were having fun.

Unfortunately, we both got busy and by 2008, our availability to work on EHFC matters had become very limited despite ever increasing traffic to the site and interest in funds – which now included Green funds….
After a period where the site was simply left stale, Midas Medici acquired it so that CommodityPoint could rebuild it and a part of that process is now complete with the launch of the new EHFC portal. The site will continue to grow with new services and information to be added and before the end of the year, the Directory (all new and up to date) will also be re-issued. Sometime in November, the site’s newsletter ‘Energy Hedge’ will also go out again to subscribers (It is Free).

A quick look at the hedge fund side of the business shows it to be as vibrant and as active as it was back in 2006. The site has always been heavily visited due to the interest in all things ‘fund’ and its acquisition and relaunch adds yet another dimension to CommodityPoint’s expertise. Take a look…..