It then swiftly moved on to the Central Panel, where industry legends including Taghi Taghi-zada from SOCAR Trading, Dr. Carole Nakhle from Crystol Energy, David Fyfe from Argus Media and Vortexa’s own David Wech explored how to balance complex global energy and freight markets. Each panelist shared their views on navigating the new realities of global trade dynamics.

After the panel and presentations, specialised sessions in the Macro Insights and Intelligence rooms were held on advanced analysis and data driven strategies looking specifically at: 

• How can trading models achieve high-end results with the right compilations of bottom up Vortexa data? 
• What is the correlation and causality between Vortexa’s vessel availability and the Baltic Exchange freight rates?

Additionally, roundtable discussions on how freight market data and technology are revolutionising pricing analytics were held featuring Mikkel Seidelin from Teekay, Jamie Shedley from Oil Brokerage and Arthur Richer from Vortexa.

One of the main themes during the London Innovation Series was the weakness in global motor fuel imports amid a world of growing clean product exports, currently occurring even before new refinery start ups start producing refined products in a meaningful way.  

We also looked closely at the fundamental support of crude oil, considering the decline of global onshore crude inventories in floating roof tanks (excluding China) and steadily declining seaborne exports.

Other topics included the drop in VLCC long-haul voyages to Asia and weaker Russian employment, which are driving dirty tanker mileage freefall. We also discussed the trend of VLCC cleanups on supertanker and Long-Range (LR) freight rates and European diesel margins. 

We close out our 2024 edition of Innovation Series and wish all of our panelists, partners and participants a big Vortexa thank you for attending and hope to see you again next year!