The rest of this course has been built around electricity and gas: how power is generated, how the grid is run, who the participants are, and how those markets are regulated. This module widens the lens to the broader commodity complex, the world of oil, refined products, and metals, and the firms that physically move them. Names like Vitol, Glencore, Trafigura, Mercuria, and Gunvor trade hundreds of billions of dollars of physical commodities a year, yet most candidates have no clear picture of what they actually do. This lesson is the framing piece for the module. It explains the merchant trading model: how a commodity trading house earns its living by moving physical barrels, tonnes, and cargoes from where they are abundant to where they are scarce, why that business is high-volume and thin-margin rather than a casino of speculative bets, and how a merchant differs from the producers and refiners it sits between. Get this model straight and the rest of the module (arbitrage, oil, metals, shipping, finance) falls into place.
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