The CTRM Blog

For Immediate Release

Houston, TX USA and Brno, Czech Republic—April 29, 2010—CommodityPoint, A Division of UtiliPoint International Inc. focused on commodity markets and technologies, has significantly expanded its industry commentary and thought leadership vehicles in 2010 through the addition of the CTRM Blog (www.ctrmblog.com) and the new weekly CommodityAlert newsletter.

The commodity trading industry is starting to see wave after wave of proposals from various government entities calling for new regulations and reporting requirements. Some of the proposals may be viewed as market tuning exercises, such as the one put forth within the last two days which could put limits on the physical location of traders’ computers relative to the trading exchanges with which they transact (as the closer you are to the exchange computers, the faster you can commit trades, particularly handy if you are a programmatic or algorithmic trader). Others, if passed as proposed, could have significant and fundamental impacts on the energy commodity markets.

The CTRM product landscape has always been somewhat fractionated, with a large number of product vendors servicing component process of the commodity trading value chain, or in some cases, specific processes associated with a single commodity. Others, those generally regarded as the “Big 5″, have gained their market leading positions by providing multi-commodity solutions that, while not addressing all the business processes associated with all commodities, do address a large portion of the functionality required by the largest energy and commodity trading operations around the world. Traditionally, most have focused more on the financial trading side providing straight through processing for paper trades while offering some degree of functionality for the physical trading but perhaps lacking operations and logistical management for physical trading.

CommodityPoint recently had an opportunity to talk with Dr. Grim Gjonnes, EVP with responsibility for business development at European TRM software vendor – Navita. We asked him what kind of year 2009 had been for his company and what he saw as key trends in the industry for 2010. Dr. Gjonnes characterized 2009 as an “excellent but challenging year” for Navita. In common with almost every other business, Navita had to conduct its activities against the backdrop of a global financial crisis and credit crunch.