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region were buying which grades at which price—that was invaluable to understanding the developing market trends at any given time. If demand were slowing in a typically hard-core market for crude purchasing, Vitol and its rivals would be the first to know, since they were negotiating deals with crude buyers directly. The minute a good customer reduced their order, the firm’s contract traders would be informed so that they could hedge Vitol’s exposure to price changes accordingly. Over time, the constellation of data points to which Andurand was exposed added up to a far more nuanced picture of the global petroleum markets than the version a bank trader would have seen.
    In addition to receiving a more sophisticated lesson in global physical oil-trading, Andurand was learning patience in the markets. Trading oil sometimes required taking a longer-term view, he realized. It also demanded an analysis of both large, overarching factors, such as central bank policies and their effect on state economies, as well as more market-driven developments, like whether there was a floor price for crude-oil contracts below which the market’s traders appeared reluctant to go.
    On a personal level, he was almost universally regarded as a sweet, self-effacing guy. When he came into money, he offered to buy his parents a bigger house in Provence and showed up the day after his mother sent him a listing in Beaurecueil, a town just east of Aix, to look at and buy it. He supported his sister and her family, at one point employing her as a secretary in London when sheneeded work. His friends found him charming, even if he was occasionally a spendthrift. “He’s just a smart, good, guy and does it his way,” Paul Andersen says.
    On the trading desk, however, Andurand was making the occasional enemy. Early in his tenure at Vitol, he was tipped off to a trading opportunity in the jet-fuel market by a social acquaintance at Morgan Stanley who also dealt with commodities. The other trader, a brash fellow Frenchman named Jean Bourlot who got so worked up about his ideas he almost vibrated with intensity, was convinced that the Singapore market for jet fuel was poised for price gains.
    Singapore jet fuel at the time was trading at about $40, but Bourlot expected it to move much higher in the months to come. He had good contacts in the small marketplace where the product traded and was positive of it. Bourlot had placed that bet in the markets himself, and wanted to put even more cash into the trade. But he had reached his maximum trade size under Morgan Stanley’s policies—which, like Goldman and Bank of America, placed limits on the amount of risk a trader could take—so he offered to sell some of his call options, which were the right to buy jet fuel at predetermined prices, to Andurand. In return, he wanted Andurand to sell those rights back to him when the time was right.
    Andurand studied the market in question and quickly agreed to purchase the contracts; Singapore jet fuel also struck him as underpriced. He bought positions from Bourlot, predicting that Singapore jet fuel would trade above $50. The cost of doing so was relatively cheap—about $2 and change per option. Andurand was under no obligation to accommodate Bourlot’s wishes in handling the trade afterward, but Bourlot seemed to have theimpression that Andurand would sell the contracts when Bourlot told him to.
    A few months later, Bourlot’s market hunch proved correct. Amid a big surge in the price of crude, a series of demands for additional cash from lenders forcedChina Aviation Oil (Singapore) Corporation Ltd., which was reportedly Singapore’s biggest jet trader, to liquidate its own trading positions in a hurry. The cash demands were such that China Aviation couldn’t afford to wait for an attractive price to offload its contracts, and other traders, spotting its distress, quickly drove its costs higher. Singapore jet prices flew higher to levels well north of $40,