What Oil Traders Do Before Markets Open

The alarm goes off at 4:45 AM. Not because the trader is disciplined. Because Singapore already closed. Dubai/Oman already settled. And the Platts Asia-Pacific window printed assessments that will shape every Brent and WTI position when London and New York wake up.

By 5:00 AM, a Head of Desk at any major trading house — Vitol, Trafigura, Gunvor, Mercuria — is already deep into the first of six distinct workflows that will run before NYMEX opens. This is not a casual scan of headlines. This is reconstruction of a global position book across physical cargoes, paper hedges, and freight commitments that together represent hundreds of millions in exposure.

Here is what that looks like, hour by hour.

5:00 AM — The Asian Close Scan

The first screen is Bloomberg. Overnight price action across ICE Brent, Dubai/Oman swaps, Singapore 380 CST fuel oil, and Asian naphtha cracks. The trader is not reading analysis. They are reading numbers. Specifically: where did the Asian physical market clear relative to yesterday’s European close.

Platts publishes Asia-Pacific crude assessments overnight. Argus does the same. These aren’t advisory — they’re benchmark prices written into physical contracts worth billions of dollars annually. A 15-cent move in the Dubai/Oman differential changes the economics of every eastbound cargo in your book.

The second screen is cargo tracking. Kpler or Vortexa showing vessel positions, AIS signals, and floating storage estimates. If three VLCCs that were headed to Shandong diverted overnight, that’s demand signal. If AIS gaps appeared on tankers flagged by OFAC, that’s sanctions risk.

By 5:20 AM, the trader has a mental model of overnight price action, physical flow changes, and any geopolitical disruptions. None of this came from a briefing document. It came from flipping between four terminals and a cargo platform while drinking the first coffee.

5:30 AM — Rebuilding the Position Book

This is where the pain starts. A typical crude trading desk runs Endur or RightAngle as the ETRM — the system of record for every trade. But the ETRM only captures what was booked. It does not capture the 11 PM text from the Singapore desk confirming they lifted an extra 500,000 barrels of Murban. It does not capture the freight broker’s email about a Suezmax that fell through.

So the Head of Desk rebuilds. They pull the overnight position report from Endur. They cross-reference it against Bloomberg execution records. They check the shared spreadsheet — yes, every trading house still has at least one critical spreadsheet — for any physical deals closed in the Asian window.

The goal is a single number: net open position by grade, by month, by region. Without this, the morning meeting is theater.

At Vitol, where partners averaged $17.5M in payouts in 2023, getting this number wrong is not an administrative inconvenience. It is a career event.

6:00 AM — Sanctions and Compliance Checks

Before any new trading day begins, the compliance function needs confirmation that overnight activity did not create sanctioned exposure. This means running vessel names against OFAC SDN, EU consolidated, and UK sanctions lists. It means checking for AIS gaps — periods where a tanker went dark, often indicating ship-to-ship transfers associated with sanctioned crude from Iran, Venezuela, or Russia.

The shadow fleet is real. Roughly 600-800 aging tankers operate outside Western insurance and classification, moving sanctioned barrels through opaque ownership chains. A trading house that inadvertently charters one of these vessels, or buys crude that touched one, faces regulatory action that makes the trading loss irrelevant.

Dow Jones Risk & Compliance and World-Check are the standard screening tools. But the screening itself is not the hard part. The hard part is matching vessel IMO numbers against frequently changing flag states, beneficial owners behind three layers of shell companies, and cargo origin documentation that may be incomplete or falsified.

This work happens every morning. It is never finished.

6:30 AM — The Morning Position Meeting

At 6:30 AM, the desk convenes. In person at the London or Geneva office. Singapore joining by video. Houston will get their own version in two hours.

The meeting runs 20-30 minutes. It covers:

• Net position by product and tenor. Brent, WTI, Dubai, fuel oil, naphtha, gasoil. Front month, Q2, Q3, Cal 26.
• Contango or backwardation. The structure of the forward curve determines whether holding physical inventory makes or loses money every day. In contango, storage pays. In backwardation, every barrel in tank bleeds value.
• Hedge ratios. Physical cargoes versus paper offsets. Where is the desk exposed. Where is it over-hedged.
• Freight. VLCC rates, Suezmax rates, Aframax rates. A $2/barrel freight move on a 2-million-barrel cargo is $4 million.
• Credit and counterparty. Any margin calls pending. Any counterparties flagged by credit risk overnight.

The Head of Desk walks out of this meeting with a trading plan for the day. Buy or sell. Which grades. Which tenors. How much risk budget remains before hitting VaR limits.

7:00 AM to 3:30 PM — The Trading Day

For the next eight hours, the desk executes. ICE screens, Bloomberg chat, broker voice lines. The physical market moves on cargo-by-cargo negotiations. The paper market moves on macro flow — hedge funds, CTAs, passive commodity indices.

But the real preparation is already done. The morning routine determined the strategy. The trading day is execution.

4:00 PM — The Platts MOC Window

At 4:00 PM London time, the Platts Market on Close assessment process opens. For the next 30 minutes, every bid and offer submitted into the Platts window is published in real time and will determine the official settlement prices for Dated Brent, North Sea Forties, and other benchmarks.

These prices set the value of physical contracts worldwide. A refinery in South Korea buying Murban on a Platts-linked formula will pay based on what happens in this 30-minute window. A trading house with 10 million barrels of physical exposure has tens of millions riding on where Dated Brent prints.

This is not a time for surprises. The trader who spent the morning rebuilding positions and understanding the curve is the one who knows exactly how many lots to bid or offer in the window. The trader who walked in at 8 AM and skimmed a summary is guessing.

Preparation is the entire edge.

5:00 PM — Reconciliation and the Singapore Handoff

After the Platts window closes, the desk shifts to reconciliation. P&L attribution — how much was made or lost, on which positions, driven by which price moves. The ETRM generates the official P&L, but every experienced trader knows the number before the system prints it.

Then comes the handoff. The Singapore desk is already at their screens — it is 1:00 AM in Singapore when the MOC window closes, but the Asian morning is six hours away. Overnight instructions pass from London to Singapore. Which cargoes to watch. Which positions to hold. Which counterparties to follow up with when Tokyo opens.

And in 11 hours, the London alarm will go off again.

Where AI Fits — and Where It Does Not

The morning routine described above takes 90-120 minutes of focused work before the desk even convenes. Most of that time is not analysis. It is aggregation — pulling data from Bloomberg, the ETRM, cargo platforms, sanctions databases, and email into a single coherent picture.

An AI agent can compress this. Scan overnight price action across every benchmark. Pull the position book from Endur and flag discrepancies against broker confirmations. Run vessel screening against OFAC/EU/UK lists and surface AIS anomalies. Generate a structured pre-meeting brief with net positions, curve structure, and freight rates — formatted for a 6:30 AM conversation, not a 40-page report.

This does not replace the trader’s judgment on whether to go long Brent-Dubai or short the Forties CFD. That judgment is worth $17.5 million a year. What it replaces is the 90 minutes of manual data assembly that the trader does before they can even begin to apply that judgment.

Barrel is built for exactly this workflow. It connects to the systems oil trading desks and trading operations teams already run — Bloomberg, Endur, Kpler, Platts — and delivers a structured morning briefing before the alarm goes off.

The cycle never stops. Singapore hands to London. London hands to Houston. Houston hands back to Singapore. Every day, 250 days a year. The traders who win are the ones who walk into the morning meeting already knowing the answer.