International Oil Trading - Advanced Techniques and Strategic Price Risk Management (VIRTUAL) - TR2V

Faculty

Dr. Carlos Blanco is a financial risk management expert with over 20 years of diverse experience in energy markets. He has worked with some of the largest energy and commodity market firms worldwide providing educational, advisory services and software solutions.

He is the managing director of analytic solutions for Ascend Analytics. He has advised risk groups and senior management in oil, gas, power, mining and trading firms on various matters related to the risk management process including risk policy, hedging strategy, risk model development and validation, risk appetite and risk metrics.

Dr. Blanco is an active faculty member for Mennta Energy Solutions since 2004, and he has conducted a wide range of energy derivatives hedging, pricing and risk management seminars worldwide. A frequent conference speaker and writer, he has coauthored over 150 articles for Energy Risk Magazine, Commodities Now, Energy Metro Desk, Oil and Gas Journal and others.

He is a former VP Risk Solutions at Financial Engineering Associates, Inc (a MSCI/BARRA Company), where he managed the market risk suite of products as well as the firm's product support and professional services group. He also taught finance at the University of California, Berkeley, and the ABN AMRO Academy. He is a former VP Risk Solutions at Financial Engineering Associates, Inc (a MSCI/BARRA Company), where he managed the market risk suite of products as well as the firm’s product support and professional services group. He also taught finance at the University of California, Berkeley, and the ABN AMRO Academy. Dr. Blanco was recently awarded the GARP Sustainability and Climate Risk (SCR) certification.

Mary Jackson has over twenty-five years' experience in the energy industry. After university she began her career at BP, working in the information management group, before joining the Manufacturing, Supply and Trading department. She subsequently worked at Saladin as a consultant, working closely with clients throughout the world and providing consultancy advice on energy market analysis, trading and risk management. In several senior roles at Saladin, she managed the energy consulting team, ran the energy market information service and directed strategy for new software and information product development.

Since 2000, Mary has worked as an independent energy market consultant and she formed Kingston Energy Consulting with Nigel Harris in 2002. Kingston Energy provides consultancy services to companies involved in energy markets and trading. A key area of work has been the European natural gas market - Kingston Energy has researched and authored a well-respected report on European natural gas trading which has been published annually since 2004.

Mary has lectured regularly for Mennta Energy Solutions on energy markets, trading and risk management and is also a regular speaker and panel member at public conferences. She has written articles for industry publications including Harts Energy Markets, Energy Risk, Global Energy Business and Petroleum Review.

Nigel Harris is a director and principal consultant at Kingston Energy Consulting, which he founded with Mary Jackson in 2002. He has been helping energy traders to analyse and understand the markets for over 25 years, initially as a developer of market analysis software systems, and more recently as a consultant. At Kingston Energy Consulting, his main focus is on providing education and information transfer to participants in the energy trading business, through instructor-led classroom training, web-based training development, research projects, workshops, briefings and research-based report writing. In his work with Mennta Energy Solutions, he has created a library of new instructor-led and web-based courses on European gas and power markets and trading. In 2005, he worked with Mary Jackson to develop the popular Oil Trading Orientation course, which has since been presented at venues all over the world. He has also extensively revised and updated many existing courses on derivatives, hedging and risk management.  He regularly presents this material both at public venues and as in-house, often customised, courses. He is co-author of a series of highly regarded reports on European natural gas trading and has also contributed to reports on power markets and oil trading. In previous roles, he was a key member of the team that initially designed and developed Saladin's innovative Petroleum Analysis Workstation, a system that became an industry standard for historical price analysis during the 1990s and remained in use in the industry for two decades. During this period, he worked closely and extensively with oil and gas traders around the world to understand their information and analytical requirements. He also spent some years as an independent consultant, working mainly with software and information providers to help them better understand the oil and gas trading sectors.