Big Oil’s trading black box

Energy trading is an opaque business, but automated and centralised data processing systems could help lift the lid on the market’s best prices

Of the thousands of investors that attended the AGMs of Shell and BP this year, many may have hoped to gain greater insight into the extent to which energy trading has contributed to the oil majors’ bumper profits. Yet again, they will have been left without a great amount of insight.   The fact is the precise impacts that trading divisions have on the bottom lines of the energy titans are hard to accurately glean. Energy trading has been called ‘black box’ of European energy conglomerates—the opaque, yet apparently highly lucrative, arm of the business of which shareholders have little understanding. This begs the question: why keep investors in the dark? After all, with big oil embarking o