Brad Jacobs

So you could go to an OPEC country and sign a contract for $23 a barrel.

And they only set the price every three months or so when they would meet in Vienna or they meet in Geneva.

In the meantime, the spot market is like $33 a barrel, for example.

And you could resell it for $10 back to back with no risk.

If the price happened to go down, you just don't lift the cargo.

You minimize the amount of lifting you have.

So this was a wonderful business to be in because of the information immaturity, the lack of free flow of information.

You would find out the pricing of oil if you weren't in the game, if you weren't in the business all day long by a snail mail newsletter you would get from McGraw-Hill, Platt's Oil Grant it was called.

And that's how people discovered price.

Now you discover it every second.

It's up on the screen with futures and you see it every tick.

So that was a big opportunity to make a lot of money.

I would no way make the kind of money I made back then today doing the same thing because-

That just doesn't exist.

The pricing is transparent and where the oil is, where it has to go is transparent.

And we did a lot of processing deals.

We did a lot of deals where we would rent, quote unquote, the refinery from Shell Rotterdam or BPN.

And we would then get the oil, charter a ship, bring it to that refinery, pay them a couple of dollars or whatever to process it.

And then we would sell what came out of that.

And people said, wow, that's real risky business.