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and by late 2004 they were flirting with $65. Midway through the price hike, Bourlot called Andurand.
    “You saw the news,” Bourlot said. “I need to buy back jet options now,” he added, referring to the positions he had sold to Andurand earlier.
    Andurand was irritated. Whatever Bourlot had envisioned at the outset, it now sounded to Andurand like Bourlot had essentially wanted to park his excess positions with Vitol until a better moment arose, at which point Bourlot would buy them back after having taken only limited risk himself. Andurand had no intention of selling back to Bourlot at Bourlot’s direction, which he thought would have been bad timing in the markets and a sure way to leave additional profits on the table.
    “I’m happy to be long,” Andurand said, meaning that he continued to think the market would move even higher. In fact, he saw an extended rally coming—perhaps for another two years. He told Bourlot to find another way to add to his portfolio.
    Bourlot was angry. “You’re making money from having that trade,” he said. “It was my idea. You should help me out.”
    “I’m sorry,” said Andurand, “but I never bought them to sell them back. I like that position. I want to let it run.”
    By April of 2005, Singapore jet had practically doubled in price from where Andurand had first bought contracts on it. Andurand says he made $40 per option on the trade, for profits of some $50 million. His bosses were thrilled and his bonus reflected it.
    Bourlot, however, made less money than he wanted, and told a mutual friend that he considered Andurand at least partly to blame. The two would be adversaries for years to come, right up to the point where they were raising money for their own personal hedge funds.
    Vitol relocated Andurand to London after a year. He was happy to finally be at the epicenter of commodity trading. He found an apartment in Knightsbridge, not far from his office near Victoria Station, and prepared for the explosion in energy prices he had been expecting.
    Andurand’s job by that time was purely to speculate. He was given about $100 million to trade crude and other energy products, markets with which he was now well acquainted. Certain crude-oil futures were in “backwardation,” or a situation in which the futures prices were lower than the current prices, but he thought that scenario temporary. He was spending much of his money on crude-oil calls dated multiple years into the future at significantly higher prices.
    At Vitol Andurand worked with a team, but nobody really bothered him. Unlike many of his colleagues, who were focused on hedging Vitol’s physical exposure as it moved crude and refined products from one location to another, he had moved beyond the more tailored deal-by-deal protective trades and was focused on the more esoteric art of predicting what other tradersmight do in the global commodity contract markets. Quantitative analysis that he’d learned at university helped him understand the history behind the market’s moves, but knowledge of the energy industry’s fundamental drivers, as well as the groupthink that helped push around prices, was crucial as well. Andurand was honing his skill for putting all those components together and coming up with a strategy for making money. And he was soon doubling his capital every year.
    He also benefited from a number of built-in advantages. Not only did Vitol do business in numerous individual physical energy markets around the world, creating the data bank that helped inform Andurand and his colleagues’ individual trades, it had massive scale as well. Its experiences in the petroleum markets were more than just anecdotal. Vitol was handling one of the single-biggest shares of the trading of oil in global markets—up to 10 percent of active, or “open,” contracts in oil in the New York Mercantile Exchange market alone, by some estimates. Those details helped Vitol’s contract traders make significant