Matthieu Favas
speaker
128 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Matthieu Favas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Intelligence from The Economist · Roaring trades: oil majors’ secret success story · 2 Jul 2026
podcast
The world's largest energy firms, collectively known as the majors.
They've done really well through this oil shock.
And one reason is that they've drilled oil and they've refined it.
And they sold it at a higher price, which is not surprising to most people.
But another reason is far less known, which is that they've done a lot of trading.
A two Favas is our commodities editor.
And the Iran war has really shown the extent to which this activity trading
has become central to these businesses.
Let's start with what you mean when you say trading.
So trading can be defined in opposition to marketing.
So marketing is selling what you produce, distributing it to the global market.
Trading is buying someone else's produce and selling it to whoever wants it most at the highest price possible, at a profit.
And whereas when you sell your own products, what matters is a level of the price at which you sell.
When you trade, what matters is the spread.
Difference between the price at which you buy and the difference in price at which you sell.
And this spread is typically higher when the market is quite chaotic.
So if there is a war somewhere, there's a supply shock, then in certain places there will be shortages, there will be also a rush for getting the product now instead of later.
And so you'll have all these differences in price that traders can seek to benefit from.
And so over time.
The majors have learned to do that really well, especially the Europeans.
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