Neil Bradford shares a London taxi with Harry Tchilinguirian, who has covered oil at the IEA, BNP Paribas, TotalEnergies and Onyx Capital Group. Harry explains why the gap between physical and futures prices shows the Brent pricing chain doing its job, why the supply bottleneck has moved from production to transport, and why China is an underappreciated risk.
Two leaders. One cab ride. Fifteen minutes. For the second episode of The Knowledge, an interview series filmed in the back of a London taxi and hosted by GX CEO Neil Bradford, we talked to Harry Tchilinguirian. Harry has covered oil from four very different seats: the International Energy Agency, BNP Paribas, TotalEnergies and Onyx Capital Group. With such a varied view of the market, we wanted to know how that background shapes his reading of how oil markets are working today.
Physical crude has swung sharply this year while crude futures have stayed relatively stable. Harry's view is that this is not a dislocation. The Brent chain connects Dated Brent to the forward market and then to futures, and each link is traded by a different crowd. When prompt barrels get scarce, Dated and its differentials move first. Futures traders, constrained by risk limits, follow more slowly.
Exports through the Strait of Hormuz have recovered, but through a far more expensive logistical chain of shuttle vessels and ship-to-ship transfers. The headline export number is not the whole story. The delivered crude price is what flows through to fuel prices and inflation, and it is the number to watch.
China has cut crude imports and refinery runs this year, which has limited how far physical and futures prices could go. Whether it can keep playing that adjustment role, possibly by drawing on the inventories it built in 2025, is one of the biggest open questions for the rest of the year.
Neil: Harry, you've maybe seen more of the markets than anybody. You've worked at a bank, you've worked at a major, you've worked at a liquidity provider. So you've had all these different seats. What did that teach you about the oil markets?
Harry: "It's interesting, because each one of these seats had a particular angle on the oil market. I started my career at the International Energy Agency, and it was really all about fundamentals and trying to get the global balance right."
"BNP Paribas was a very different animal, in the sense that I got to really look at how corporates and investors would deploy risk. Then moving on to Total, obviously one of the big majors with a big trading arm, things got a lot more granular. You're looking at regional balances, quality balances."
"Finally, Onyx, as a market maker and liquidity provider, brings in a lot of the market participants that I saw at BNP Paribas and a lot of physical players. Through those flows you get a sense of how the market is interpreting current conditions, just in terms of the positioning of those players in the swap markets."
Taken together, those four seats cover the whole chain: the global balance, how financial players take on risk, the granular physical detail of grades and regions, and how all of that shows up as positioning in the swaps market.
Neil: There's been a massive explosion in data over your career. What have you seen change in the data that's available to traders and analysts?
Harry: "Think about today. We have almost real-time tracking of tankers, although with caveats, because transponders don't always tell you exactly where ships are. You have tanker tracking, storage tracking. Those were unavailable when I started my career."
"But with the explosion of data, what has come as well, and I think this is important, is the ability to process that data. You have to sift through a lot of data and visualize it in a way that the analyst can make a forecast, or that the trader can then execute on, because he sees exactly what's going on."
"That's important. It's the ability to execute quickly on the data, and that means a lot of data processing."
The edge has shifted. Twenty years ago the advantage was having the data at all. Today most serious participants can see the same tankers and the same tanks, and the advantage comes from how quickly that data can be cleaned, processed and acted on.
Neil: In terms of the traders you've supported over the years, have they changed in what they're good at? Are they all just behind a screen now? Do they still know how to talk to counterparties? What's a winning trader in 2026, from where you sit?
Harry: "The difference between just a trader and a really good trader is consistent and regular returns, year in, year out. And that's done through discipline and careful risk management."
"If the trader doesn't do that, he will not be a good trader. If he acts on intuition, or just on his own market view, one day he may make a huge profit, and the next day he may blow up spectacularly."
"I remember at Total, with the juniors coming into the trading function, the trader mindset, at least in my view, is not very far from the sort of coaching you have for high performance athletes. Tennis players, racing drivers: these people are coached. They may have technical abilities that are innate, but after that the great trader still needs rigor and discipline."
Neil: The market has been sending a different signal, though. Futures have been relatively stable and haven't gone to crazy prices, whereas on the physical side, where we produce prices, you see incredible swings and oil that is very expensive in certain parts of the world. Is that dislocation new?
Harry: "No. I think it's a miscomprehension by many people of how the actual pricing chain works from physical to futures."
"In the Brent chain, you're connecting Dated Brent to cash Brent, the physical forward, which is then connected to futures. This chain moves with movements in the market. So when you have sudden prompt scarcity, you're going to see the DFLs and the CFDs bid out of proportion, because refiners need prompt oil. The way the chain reacts is that Dated is going to go up. The differentials that relate Dated to the forward, the CFDs, are going to spike, and of course so will Dated to futures."
"Now futures, think about it. The people trading futures are a very different crowd from those trading Dated Brent. We have a handful of physical players that are really into the Dated market. Futures is everybody and anybody, from retail investors to hedge funds to banks."
"So why are futures lagging behind? In a world of uncertainty, we're back to capital at risk. You can see how risk managers tighten the screws. While something could look very bullish, how much risk you can actually deploy is going to depend on what your VaR is telling you."
"The price chain functions. People see that as a disconnect. If you have a better understanding of the prices that connect physical to futures, you actually see that the market is doing its job."
This is the point we would underline. The DFL (Dated to frontline) and CFD (Dated to forward) markets exist precisely to price the gap between prompt physical barrels and the rest of the curve. When prompt supply tightens, those spreads should widen first. A wide gap between physical and futures prices is a signal about where the scarcity sits, not evidence that the benchmark has broken.
Neil: What are general market observers missing that you're seeing? Underappreciated risks, or opportunities?
Harry: "The biggest thing for me comes down to interpretation. The bottleneck in the supply chain has moved from production to transport."
"When people get excited that exports through the Strait of Hormuz have recovered: yes, they have recovered, but it's done through a very different logistical chain, where you have shuttle vessels taking oil to tankers, ship-to-ship transfers. Extremely expensive. So the delivered crude price at the end of the day is going to be extremely expensive."
Harry: "We can't just say, thankfully it's over, exports have recovered. Actually, what is the delivered price doing? Because that's what matters for fuel prices, and that's what matters from a macro perspective, for inflation."
"Seeing where the bottleneck is and looking at those delivered crude prices is a very important feature that people tend to underestimate, or at least, in my view, don't fully appreciate."
Volumes and prices tell different stories here. A recovery in barrels moved says nothing about what it cost to move them. For refiners, and ultimately for consumers and central banks, the price that matters is the one paid at the point of delivery.
Harry: "Actually, Neil, there's one more thing, like Steve Jobs would say. Underappreciated risks: China."
"One of the biggest factors this year has been how China has reduced its crude imports and its refinery throughputs. That has made a big difference to how far physical crude prices and futures prices can go. Maybe they tapped into the inventories they built in 2025."
"The question is, longer term, or even for the end of this year, what is China going to do? Can it keep playing that adjustment role in this market, the one that has been preempting those $200 a barrel calls we heard earlier from the more enthusiastic analysts? We'll see."
That is a fitting place to end. Much of this year's price action has been shaped less by the supply shock itself than by how buyers responded to it. China's ability to step back from the market has acted as a release valve. If that valve closes, the physical market will be the first place it shows, and Dated Brent and its differentials will register it before the headline futures price does.
