Natixis in a sweet spot amid the oil market rout

PIN Chua need only point at the view from his office window, to show off the profits that global traders have locked in from cheap oil. Out at sea, large tankers hired by traders are lazing about in the sun, with oil in their bellies.

This oil play - buoyed mainly by a trading opportunity known as contango - has lifted 2015 revenue of Natixis, for which Mr Chua heads the operations in South-east Asia and South Asia.

Global traders, such as Glencore, Trafigura, and Vitol, have snapped up barrels of oil last year because then, the current or spot prices of oil were lower than that of futures, which are contracts that oil importers such as refiners enter into, for delivery at a later time. Traders took full advantage of this arbitrage through contango, storing oil on large tankers that can each hold roughly two million barrels of crude, and selling the oil on forward contracts. Broadly, as long as the storage cost is less than the spread made off the spot-forward difference, the traders make money.