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traders in Singapore’s expatriate community did, he spent quiet evenings at home with hisgirlfriend, a junior employee in Morgan Stanley’s commodities division.
    The risk-taking Andurand did do was all in the markets. He was beginning to understand the ebb and flow of market sentiment in his corner of the commodity-trading business, and was making considerable money off his price wagers. His instincts soon led to another big win. In the first few months of 2003, his second year at Bank of America, a series of well-timed trades generated another $30 million, an astonishing sum for an inexperienced trader.
    With his pile of cash and risk limits higher than ever, he went into the second quarter betting that jet fuel prices would trend higher as a result of new flights that Asian airlines were adding to their schedules. Instead he was hit with one of those unexpected, market-changing events: the outbreak of a respiratory flu called SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, that devastated the region’s economy. In the wake of the epidemic, people stopped flying, and the price of jet fuel tanked as a result, losing Andurand $40 million in the markets.
    The situation arguably could not have been foreseen, so Andurand didn’t castigate himself. He was still plenty confident. It was turning into a bad year for commodities at Bank of America overall, and management was under pressure to improve results. The SARS loss was just bad timing, Andurand told himself. He thought he might be better off at a dedicated trading firm that understood risk-taking and provided the money with which to do it, rather than in a small department within a giant bank that had other, more important priorities and would be chastened by a single bad quarter.
    It was typical of his mind-set, both then and later. “He fullyexpects that he will make a huge amount of money and that he’s right,” says Paul Andersen, who hired Andurand for the Bank of America job and still considers him a friend. “If the trade doesn’t go well, then the market doesn’t understand.”
    Whether he was fired or quit wasn’t clear. But Andurand hit the job market with his signature attitude—admitting the missteps he’d made, but at the same time blaming the environment and vowing to do better. In an industry that valued traders with both swagger and a desire to change their errant ways, Andurand struck just the right tone, and Vitol Group, the large physical oil trader that operated a 250-man derivatives operation around the world, was impressed.
    “There was no attempt to justify himself, and there was a very clear acknowledgement that things had gone wrong,” remembers one of the Vitol managers who interviewed Andurand over dinner in London. Andurand told the group that “there were a number of aspects he had not taken into account, had not understood, and he believed he could learn those aspects by coming into maybe a more rounded organization than a bank,” the manager adds, “which always takes a rather one-sided look at things. He was willing to reinvent himself to an extent.”
    Andurand stayed in Singapore during his first year with Vitol. Unlike Bank of America and Goldman, which did a little client hedging and a little house trading, Vitol was a huge dealer in physical oil and refined products and used derivatives to mitigate its exposure to short-term price changes. If Vitol bought crude oil from Nigeria at a fixed price, for instance, it might be a couple of weeks before the crude reached its destination in Europe, during which time the price could drop. It was the job of Vitol’s traders to use futures or other contracts to lock in more attractive prices forcrude that would smooth out any potential losses from that two-week lag. In so doing, traders like Andurand were made privy to perfectly legal inside information on the world’s physical petroleum markets—which former Soviet states were selling for which price, which refiners in the Singapore