Episode
How the World’s Largest Oil Derivatives Trading Firm Is Navigating the Iran War
- Podcast
- Odds on Open
- Published
- Mar 19, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4177
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Summary
This episode was filmed on Thursday, March 12, 2026. Greg Newman, founder and CEO of Onyx Capital Group and the largest liquidity provider in oil derivatives markets, on what it actually looks like to run a market-making book when liquidity breaks down entirely. What most participants misunderstand about oil vol is that the outright price — Brent, WTI — is a proxy, not the market; the real information lives in time spreads, regional diffs, and niche contracts that only a handful of firms have visibility into. Why fair value discovery in a dislocated market requires abandoning automation, reverting to manual process, and using physical market participant behavior — refiners, producers, airlines — as a real-time signal rather than a lagged one. Greg co-founded Onyx Capital Group in 2016 after a decade trading crude and refined products across increasingly niche oil derivatives contracts. Onyx built its position by stepping into the vacuum left by banks exiting commodities post-Volcker, becoming the dominant liquidity provider across European, Middle Eastern, and Asian oil markets with an estimated 20–50% market share in several key contracts. The firm now operates market-making desks across London, New York, Dubai, and Singapore, and has expanded into data services, a single-dealer platform, retail brokerage, and physical trade finance — building a vertically integrated oil markets infrastructure business from a pure prop-trading foundation. In this episode we cover: • Why trading oil outrights during the dislocation was a losing game — and where the real edge was • Fair value discovery on Sunday night: how Onyx priced contracts when every historical model broke • Physical market reflexivity: how refiners, producers, and airlines all become forced actors at key pri…