Senior Trader (Fixed Term Contract - 24 months)

Supervise the day-to-day trading activities, including proposing new trading strategies to align trading activities with changing market trends and improve profitability; execute purchases and sales of petroleum products, feedstock and blend-stock; supervise trading staff; and propose optimisation strategies around existing business assets to ensure profitability to the business.

• Supervise the implementation of the group strategy and plans as directed by the Trading Manager within the Trading department, and ensure alignment between relevant departments and PetroSA divisions in realising existing and new business opportunities.
• Supervise the purchasing and sale of fuel products, crude oil and refinery feedstock by being actively present in the market, understanding the petroleum market landscape, executing physical crude, product and derivatives trades, and building sound counterparty relationships to ensure profitable growth and the reduction of feedstock costs.
• Supervise the price risk function together with the Trading Manager and Risk Manager by ensuring trade reconciliation and broker validation are performed, trading solutions are implemented to mitigate and manage risk within tolerable levels and limits, and a clear, traceable link between physical and paper trades is maintained for all trades.
• Monitor and supervise the supplier management function by communicating factors that might impact PetroSA's business and identifying opportunities that can be further explored, to protect against reputational risk and identify profitable growth opportunities.
• Maintain existing relationships and partnerships, identify business threats and strengths that could impact PetroSA, and negotiate and execute trading deals with suppliers and third parties, evaluating associated risks to secure flexible, market-related terms and a profitable sales margin.
• Monitor and analyse external global market and environmental factors and benchmark specific business opportunities to evaluate the best outcome and fit with existing business, ensuring market opportunities are identified and PetroSA's reputation as a professional organisation with a high level of integrity is maintained.
• Maintain strategic direction as guided by the Trading Manager and Risk Manager by ensuring compliance with existing policies and procedures, and provide recommendations and opinions to the Trading Manager, Executive: Trading, Executive: Sales and Marketing and the governance committees to ensure compliance with controls, standards and regulations.
• Develop and maintain an on-going knowledge of trading-related standards for ports, facilities and pipelines to ensure compliance with PetroSA's policies, procedures and related regulations.
• Develop and negotiate service level agreements with internal and external stakeholders, review these on a regular basis, and monitor compliance with performance criteria, alerting management of any deviation from agreed standards.
• Supervise and perform price risk management by executing approved price risk management strategies and tools, hedging price risk exposures and protecting margins, and monitoring open paper positions through daily mark-to-market procedures.
• Build and maintain an understanding of the delegation of authority limits and trading-specific systems to ensure optimum system utilisation and compliance for every deal, and good corporate governance in the trading department.
• Provide the required information for internal audit purposes in compliance with PetroSA's policies and procedures.
• Align the execution of trading deals with shipping activities, together with the Shipping Manager, ensuring market deal analysis, shipping demand, chartering and scheduling are available for efficient departmental operation and the reduction of operational costs.
• Supervise and monitor the business solutions applied to the optimisation of strategic stock directives, to ensure optimum margins are derived from stock holding and to seek opportunities for profit generation associated with strategic stock.
• Monitor and give input on the management of OPEX and departmental budgets for the trading department, and monitor distribution/logistics costs against budget targets, ensuring elements showing high variance are corrected.
• Provide and ensure trading gives customers the required information to enable physical deals to be executed within the required time periods, and provide assistance for new business development within other PetroSA divisions related to supply chain optimisation or integration of new products.
• Foster a culture of self-development, provide leadership, technical advice and mentorship to the trading discipline, and support a business environment open to creative ideas for new business opportunities and system improvements.

Minimum qualifications:

• BSc Engineering or Postgraduate degree in Finance/Business

Minimum work experience:

• 10 (ten) years' experience within the supply and trading environment in the Petrochemical Industry and/or commodity banking, of which 5 (five) years at supervisory managerial level