Senior Trader (Secondment - 24 months)

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

• Supervise the purchasing and sales function/ process within the Trading department by being actively present in the market and using postulates to access opportunities for PetroSA which would include understanding Petroleum market landscape to realise results, executing physical crude, product, and derivatives trades, ensuring a positive contribution for trading deal outcomes including optimisation opportunities for refinery or assets belonging to the organisation, and building sound relationships with counterparties to ensure sustainability is offered through profitable growth and the reduction of feedstock costs.
• Supervise price risk function/process together with the Trading Manager and Risk Manager by ensuring trade reconciliation and broker validation is performed as per the business requirements, trading solutions are implemented to ensure that risk is mitigated/or managed and is within the tolerable levels and limits, and that a clear link between physical and paper trades for all trades exists and traceable, to ensure risk exposure is mitigated and business targets are met.
• Maintain strategic direction as guided by the Trading Manager together with the Risk Manager by ensuring compliance to existing policies and procedures and provide recommendations and opinions to the Trading Manager/ Executive: Trading and Supply as well as the Governance committees to ensure compliance to controls, standards, and regulations.
• Align the execution of trading deals with shipping activities as per approved business processes together with the shipping manager by making sure market deal analysis, shipping demand, chartering, and scheduling are available for the efficient operation of the department to ensure that there is an understanding of shipping operations and tools available to manage operational impacts and the reduction of operational costs
• Supervise and monitor business solutions applied to optimisation of strategic stock directives for the strategic stock trading function/ process to ensure optimum margins are derived from stock holding and to seek opportunities for profit generation associated with strategic stock.
• Monitor and supervise the supplier management function/process by communicating factors that might impact PetroSA’s business and identify possible opportunities that can be further explored by the rest of PetroSA to ensure protection against reputational risk and for the identification of profitable growth opportunities.
• Maintain existing relationships/ partnerships and identify business threats and strengths that could impact PetroSA, monitor and analyse external global market and environmental factors and benchmarking for specific business opportunities to evaluate the best outcome and fit with existing business to ensure market opportunities are identified, sustainable partnerships and business solutions, embeddedness in the market and PetroSA’s reputation is maintained as a professional organisation with a high level of integrity.
• Develop and negotiate service level agreements with internal and external stakeholders which are reviewed on a regular basis, and monitor compliance to service level agreement performance criteria and alert management of deviations from agreed standards in compliance to policies and procedures to ensure service delivery standards are maintained.
• Foster and harness the culture of self-development through continued professional development as well as ensure that there is a business environment open to creative ideas for business propriety systems that can be utilised for new business opportunities and develop sets of requirements for system upgrades that would be developed for future use, to ensure effective financial reporting and that existing business processes are updated before projects/ opportunities are implemented. 
• Monitor and give inputs on the management of OPEX and departmental budgets for the trading department within business requirements to ensure cost reduction and improvements in cash flows.  
• Provide and ensure assistance is provided by trading for new business development within other divisions in PetroSA specifically related to supply chain optimisation or integration of new products, to ensure alignment of business drivers.
• Provide leadership, technical advice, and mentorship to trading discipline to ensure people development and team enhancement.

Minimum Qualifications:

• BSc Engineering or Post Graduate Diploma in Finance/Business

Minimum work experience:

• 10 years' experience within the Supply and Trading environment in the Petrochemical Industry and/or commodity banking
• 5 years' experience at supervisory/managerial level