August 18, 2025 • 33 mins
In this episode, we shine a light on one of the most powerful yet misunderstood sectors in finance - commodities. Joined by Lauren Haymond, Global Head of Talent Strategy at Castleton Commodities International (CCI), we unpack what makes this industry uniquely dynamic and ripe with opportunity for early career talent.
Lauren shares her personal journey from headhunting to high finance, and breaks down the various roles beyond trading, including risk management, data science, and operations. Discover how CCI fosters rapid career growth, the traits and technical skills that make candidates stand out, and how to navigate emotional resilience in high-pressure roles.
Whether you're a student exploring career options or a young professional aiming to make a meaningful impact, this episode offers invaluable advice on learning agility, proactivity, and how to build lasting industry connections, especially if you’re starting from scratch.
Listen in and get inspired to consider a future in commodities.
(00:00) Introduction and Topics in Focus
(00:48) Lauren's Background in Hiring & Talent
(01:54) The Unique Aspects of Commodities
(07:06) What is Flow & Fundamentals in Trading
(08:54) Skills and Traits for Success in Commodities
(11:19) Understanding Roles in Commodities Trading
(14:20) The Importance of Collaboration at Work
(15:20) Best Practice in your Early Career
(17:48) Building Emotional Resilience
(22:26) The Value of Learning Agility
(25:11) Networking and Career Development in Finance
(28:28) Recommended Resources for Commodities
(30:45) What is Principle Investing?
Find out more about careers at CCI
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Commodity trading powers the world and yet most students have
no idea what it actually involves.
So we, in this episode, are aiming to change that.
I'm joined by Lauren Hammond, the global head of talent
strategy at Castleton Commodities International, to
breakdown what makes the commodities industry so unique,
the range of roles available andthe key skills needed to land
(00:23):
them. You can expect practical tips
from this conversation, how to interview well, the traits
employers look for as some greatresources as well to help you
along the way. So let's let's dive in.
Lauren, how are you? Well.
Anthony, thank you so much for having me.
Appreciate it. I think the best place to start
is like I do with all of our guests, it's just for them to
get a sense of who you are. So a little bit of a summary of
(00:45):
your background and and the roleyou have today would be would be
great. Absolutely.
So I effectively fell into HRI, started in recruiting as a
headhunter, so effectively consulting with firms to place
people into various positions. I think similar to what people
experience in consulting, you have an assignment, you complete
(01:09):
the assignment and then you go away and you don't get to see
the results of it. So from there I went in house
and worked at a big bank and then worked at within private
equity at The Blackstone Group and then eventually made my way
here to Castleton. And it's going to be about 15
years in another couple weeks. Wow.
(01:29):
Oh, yeah, congratulations on 15 years.
So This is why I'm, I'm excited about this conversation because
from your description, then there's a whole wealth of
experience here and there's kindof two areas to go into.
One is commodities, because I think it's such an undeserved
area of finance for what kind offinance majors or people
interested in finance or thinking.
And then the second, some of these practical tips that I
(01:51):
mentioned earlier. So perhaps we could start at the
beginning. So what makes working in
commodities feel different from other parts of finance when
we're talking things like investment banking or or trading
in asset management, these sortsof things?
Absolutely. Well, typically in investment
banking or within asset management, there is this longer
(02:11):
path where over time you're given additional
responsibilities and you would play a different role on a
particular deal. For example, within banking,
typically in banking, unless you're at one of the you know
more boutique banks, but even then you're working with a very
large team, you are siloed into doing a particular function and
(02:33):
you're more insular within your particular group within
commodities and in most trading houses or even funds.
Your career growth is more aboutyour business impact, learning
about new products, exploring new methods, being able to if
you migrate into trading, being able to assume more capital or
(02:57):
deploy more risk over time and continuing to evolve your
strategy. So if you're in the front office
here, it is the path where even from a compensation, from a
compensation perspective, but even in terms of your mandate,
the ceiling is much higher and you can get there much faster.
And one of the things I think people appreciate about CCI, and
(03:21):
I certainly do, is it doesn't matter how much experience you
have. There's a reason why we have
campus programs. And I wish more companies took
advantage of this. Technology is changing.
The world is changing really quickly and some amazing ideas
can come with people that don't have prerequisite experience in
our markets. And so you're not pigeon holed
(03:42):
into just having a particular function or being exposed to
particular work because you are junior in terms of your years of
experience. There's always, you know,
different things that people need to do at different stages
of their career as part of the learning path.
But not being pigeon holed and being able to really expand your
(04:04):
your career faster is what's unique to CCI and typically what
would be unique to companies of a particular size within the
markets. Would there would just thinking
what you said there, would therewould be a case where someone
has worked at one of these traditional banks like a sell
side institution in trading and has pivoted to commodities
because I know obviously they docover commodities to some
(04:26):
extent, yeah. Absolutely.
And it's interesting because in a campus recruiting process, and
many of our students are going to experience this in the US,
the recruiting takes place really, really early for
interns. So you can be in your second
year in university and it's the spring semester and that's when
(04:48):
all the big banks with the very large campus recruiting teams
are coming on campus for you to actually take on or secure an
internship for the following summer.
So the summer after your junior year.
And there's a little bit of FOMO, if you will, of many
students that are looking around.
They're going to great universities.
A lot of their, a lot of their other fellow students are
(05:12):
interviewing for these companies.
They're getting offers and they don't want to miss out and they
also want to be able to go home and tell their parents.
I've secured an internship alongthe path now for us and for most
within the alternatives, unless you're very large private equity
or maybe some very, very large multi Strat funds, the majority
(05:33):
of them are going to adhere to astandard campus recruiting
process where you're hiring yourinterns in the fall of their
junior year to start that next quarter.
We would, we explain to people some of the differences in what
the path is within, you know, investment banking.
And it's a really challenging path.
And you can look at any sort of finance memes and go on your
(05:55):
Instagram or go on TikTok and there's a lot to laugh about.
And so it typically is that we would stay in touch with those
types of students and they see the difference.
They see how and I experienced it too.
I wanted to grow faster. I knew I was capable of doing
more. And you're in a banking
structure and it is what it is. It's you that is your time to do
(06:17):
that particular work and it really stunts career growth.
And so for us if we're looking to maybe look to hire from a
bank, we've hired some analysts and and junior traders
typically, although we have hired some more senior risk
takers that would come from banks as well.
The key differentiation, the more senior you get, the more
(06:38):
you're going to get exposure to client flow.
And for us as a fundamental shop, we really need to
differentiate between what is the proprietary trading versus
the flow. The more that you're in the
system, the harder it is also todifferentiate that from our
assessment perspective. But it's also quite challenging
when, you know, moving out of having that information flow
(07:01):
into a shop where you're not going to have that client flow
because we don't have clients. Can I just jump on 2 words that
you're using, that you're using like flow, for example, and
fundamentals? So what are those?
Just for those people who perhaps are from like a, let's
say a STEM background, have never really heard of a lot of
trading terminology. Sure.
(07:22):
And and for our shop, I think that's why it's important to at
least have some type of exposureto economics.
But for us fundamentals are the supply and demand economics of
of what's happening, but also some of the fundamentals could
be related to weather. Some of the things that shift
fundamentals and this is what makes the commodities market so
interesting is there's also macro factors.
(07:45):
So there's macro factors like geopolitical factors.
There are several wars that are going on.
There's energy policy, there's ahuge focus on energy security
right now. And there's also event driven
things. There could be something that is
stated in the news about a particular change.
Of course, there could be thingslike a refinery is down or there
(08:09):
could be other factors like weather is a major, major
factor. So those are some of the inputs
into a model that we would have here.
From a fundamental perspective, flow is more like you have a
very large client. It could be an, let's just
assume an institutional client that is putting on a very, very
large trade and you know that that trade is happening and
(08:32):
you're able to trade off of thatinformation within your
proprietary book knowing that that actually is existing.
Whereas if you're sitting in ourshop, you wouldn't know that
that particular trade is happening because you're not
managing that trade from the institutional client.
That's great. That makes complete sense.
So thank you for that breakdown.And I think when we were talking
(08:54):
on a previous call, I was reallyintrigued by whether or not what
you look for in candidates had changed in the context of
globalization, the rise in data complexity.
Some of those things you mentioned like the weather can
be highly complex in terms of trying to forecast out the
future patterns and so forth. So how has that changed in
recent years of when you're looking for new talent?
(09:18):
Over time, there's been significantly more data
available. And so how are you able to
manage all of that data and put it into a model and be able to
kind of aggregate report etcetera.
And so over time the the rise oftechnical skills across the
board, I think with any company for the most part, we need
(09:40):
increased technical skills to beable to code manipulate data,
etcetera. So that's something that's just
increased with the like significant amount of data
that's required or that's available in the market.
What hasn't changed? Our core things that are going
to make anybody successful here,being a self starter, not being
(10:05):
afraid to make mistakes, you know, having humility, meaning
none of us know all the information, none of us know all
the answers. So having a collaborative
approach to understand if people's different perspectives
and inputting that potentially into your perspectives, being
(10:25):
incredibly hardworking and passionate about the markets.
The people that are really, really successful here live and
breathe. Things happen over the weekend.
They're sending updates to theirteam or to the broader teams
that might even not have, might not have a direct correlation to
the, the trading that the of thestrategy that they're in, but
maybe another strategy. They're just living, living and
(10:46):
breathing it every single day. Yeah, I love that.
And definitely I'm going to probe you more for some of those
characteristics and how young people can develop those.
But maybe before I get to that one thing that you know, the
conversation, naturally, it kindof feels like often people talk
about traders and trading, but you and I both know that there's
(11:07):
way more to a team in terms of different roles, different
responsibilities, risk analytics, so forth.
So I wondered if you could just walk me through those different
roles and how they all kind of come together and within one
team. Yeah.
I, I think Castleton is unique in that no matter what position
you're in here, whether you're in a direct revenue generating
(11:28):
position, meaning trading, or wehave principal investment
activities here as well, or you're working within talent,
what has kept me here for 15 years is being able to be a true
partner to the business. So the more context that you
have on what the business objectives are and then domain
expertise, the better partner you can be.
But typically on a trading desk,it consists of a trading lead or
(11:52):
a desk head. If you call that a portfolio
manager, there may be other traders at varying levels that
would be allocated certain amounts of risk under the
portfolio manager and then thereare analysts as well.
Risk management especially here plays a unique role in
partnering with our businesses. So there the way that we manage,
(12:17):
hedge, identify our risks is keyto our success.
And they are working with each of the trading desk, getting an
understanding of their fundamentals of their positions,
making recommendations so that they work very, very closely.
Same thing with data science andtechnology here.
So we have a fund office development team, we have a data
(12:39):
engineering team that is like cleansing and categorizing data
in the data science scene that'srunning machine learning model.
So it actually one of the great things and this is also an
evolution and what we would lookfor is in the past a lot of
those data science and technology activities existed
more on the trading desk within the analyst role.
And that actually took a lot of time for the analysts.
(13:00):
They could spend 5060 plus percent of their time just
managing data feeds and making sure that those parts were
working. Now it's more how do I enhance
the models? What inputs are missing?
Let me analyze what's happening and make some predictions.
And it allows for more time or capacity to start thinking
about, well, what's the market doing and hopefully getting to
(13:22):
the point where they're startingto think about what's a
potential trade idea. And that's been a huge evolution
here as well. But all of those functions along
with operations, components of finance, they're all working
very, very closely with our trading desk.
And including, for example, if we were to hire a new trader or
a new analyst, we have a team that connects with all of the
(13:46):
other teams to be able to bring that person online and onboard
them faster. And so I'm getting this kind of
culture of collaboration and I know that often in other firms
they have and, and again, perhaps good to explain the
different setups because they can be these isolated pod setups
rather than a more collaborativeteam oriented sharing of
(14:08):
intelligence sort of setup. So yeah, how where does CCI sit
in in contrast to it's competitors in the way that it
supports that talent through their their journey?
It's an incredibly collaborativeculture and that the expectation
is that you're working with colleagues that are going to
(14:29):
help support each other from a trading perspective.
I mean, there are individual trading businesses, you could
call them pods, but in some pod models, those different
strategies are not allowed to communicate with each other.
Here it's expected. And so some information can be
shared there could be, you know,as far as direct trading ideas
(14:51):
shared, or it could be more like, let's celebrate on the
fundamentals of the market. OK, So perhaps we could change
down tact and go a little bit more in towards some of the
things I'm, I'm sure lots of students are really keen to
understand, which is kind of like best practices.
And when you started at the beginning and you were saying
(15:12):
about your career journey all different places you worked.
I think you're a really good person to speak about this type
of topic. So I've just wondered, is there
any kind of something you see with all the time you've you've
come across that you just wishedthat more students followed,
that perhaps they're not doing so at this point in time?
(15:33):
Many students or people that areearlier on in their career,
sometimes they sit back and theyare kind of waiting for people
to give them instructions, information, work if they're not
at full capacity. And it's those that are
proactive, proactive in seeking out work, proactive in seeking
(15:53):
out relationships, information, proactive and sharing ideas.
That's really key. In addition, I mean, I think you
can't teach this. Those that are just hard working
and you can tell that they care.Individuals that are incredibly
detail oriented and also know the balance between being
(16:20):
resourceful and trying to work through problems or a project on
their own or within the team versus looking for, you know the
answer right away, but the balance between that and waiting
too long and heading in the wrong direction.
And so those are the types of things that make people
(16:42):
successful here in general. From a trading perspective, that
makes it a little bit harder. There isn't 1 background.
There wasn't one, you know, educational background or direct
experiences necessarily. If I look at all of the
different successful portfolio managers, traders that we have
here, there's a differentiation educational background and how
(17:05):
they got to where they are. Those things that I said earlier
are all stated, and I do think asense of humility,
identification of mistakes that they've made and the learnings
that happened from that. It's interesting.
I was having a conversation withsome students who are really yet
to start their career and I was talking about the importance of
honesty and, and particularly around when you're working in a
(17:28):
front office role and you know, decisions are being made on the
information flow you're providing.
It's like the integrity of accuracy and honesty is of the
utmost importance. So it's really interesting.
So productivity, resourcefulness, hard working,
detail orientated, they're all top traits.
So you've mentioned to me beforeas well about the proactiveness.
(17:50):
But the other thing I was thinking is the challenge of the
emotional kind of burden of working in an industry like
this, whether in commodities or or any, I guess front office
role in finance. I just wondered whether you had
any practical insights on how young people can start building
up those, those muscles that kind of emotional resiliency,
(18:12):
for example, because a lot of them won't have experience or
perhaps have had a life experience situation yet that
might have naturally brought that.
So what could where could you steer them in order to start
harnessing some of these skills around the emotional challenges
of trade? I think it's putting yourself in
(18:32):
a position to put an idea to start with, like putting an idea
out there and being wrong and going through.
And, and most of the pretty muchevery student that we hire here
has had an incredibly strong educational background to the
point where you're talking to them and they haven't been wrong
(18:53):
many times in their life and going through the emotions of
actually being wrong because as a trader, you're going to be.
It's just how wrong are you? How often, how big was the
trade? And so that could be, you know,
a start of it for us. And I would say if your ambition
is to trade, ask the question ofwhat the potential path would
(19:16):
look like. There are some shops out there
where you might never get an opportunity to trade.
There are some market makers forexample, where you'll be trading
from the beginning, but are you really taught how to make a
sustained career out of it? For us, I almost view it as, and
I have 4 year old so bear with me, but as training wheels.
And so if somebody starts to demonstrate real interest and
(19:40):
aptitude to trading, it's start pitching ideas then from there
and that's showing that you're really understanding what's
happening in the market. You start pitching ideas to your
trader, your portfolio manager. Over time, you may be allocated
a small amount of risk under their book, but you're still
performing for the most part at an analytical role.
(20:01):
But that allows for some time tobe able to learn and go through
the emotions of. The highs and lows of what
happens day-to-day or month to month in a particular market
without also especially earlier in your career feeling like your
bonus is at risk. And so that's the time to really
focus on your approach, to focuson the emotions, to learn about
(20:24):
risk management, which is so keyin trading, and then eventually
get to the point where you're also building a track record for
yourself, knowing that how you've handled particular
situations. And I think experience is
helpful in that. And if you've seen something
before and you may have been emotional before, maybe the
second time, third time around, you're not.
And then eventually getting to the point where you'd have, you
(20:47):
know, a full book for yourself or you're so likely trading
under another trader for severalyears, but you have your own
book in your own Direct Line to it.
So it's having that time to do it.
The emotional piece is somethingthat everybody struggles with.
We've leveraged a coach here where, you know, he also trains,
(21:10):
works with Olympians and about their emotions and regulating.
It's very similar to to going inbasically every single day and
you have one of the biggest contents of your life.
So I certainly wasn't built for that.
And it takes a unique individual.
And so a lot of people come in thinking that that's what they
(21:31):
want to do and that's great. And that's one of the objectives
of the program that we have here.
But analytics and risk management and technology are
the key components of how we aresuccessful over time.
So just because you don't end uptrading at a CCI, you can still
have a fantastic career from just a continuing to build your
(21:55):
experience and impact and also just from a compensation
perspective. So I, I think it's also
understanding what you feel comfortable with.
Like are you willing to live with these types of emotions?
And do you, are you able to stayeven?
Do these types of things bother you or do they not, You know,
how do you, are you able to sleep well at night and, and
(22:15):
manage and regulate yourself? And, and those are things that
can be learned, but they also might not be innate in
everybody. So you have to decide whether
it's OK for you. So you've spoken before about
the value of learning agility, and when you say that, I know
what you mean, but I've never really heard that phrase, I
don't think as such. I just wondered then how do you
(22:39):
spot it in students? What are the signals you look
for? I mean, like you said, you might
be interacting with people who are quite young, quite
inexperienced. So what are some of these early
signals? Because I think it helps for
people to also translate when they're thinking about their
future career decisions. A lot of jobs, they don't even
know what they are and how they exist.
(23:00):
So connecting those dots throughsome of your signals might be
super useful. How would you answer the
question? Give me an example of something
that you've never had prior exposure to, whether in a new
class or in a new area of learning.
How did you go about, you know, coming up to speed on that?
It's one way to measure or just looking at their experiences,
(23:25):
how diversified? Is it a little bit more one note
and like they're pursuing the same thing and just building on
that? Or do they have diversified
interests and experiences withintheir educational background,
within their any sort of prior work history in life in general?
And those are other ways to determine that too.
(23:46):
Because when you're hiring at the grad level, you're
effectively hiring for all thosethings that we talked about
earlier and you're trying to assess and including technical
skill as well. You're also hiring for promise,
right? And, and what is the potential?
And so to me, learning agility is aligned with potential.
(24:06):
The more that you're able to learn because markets are ever
changing, significantly changing.
And so the ability to continue to reinvent yourself, reinvent
your strategy, your approach to things, make sure that you are
aligning with new technology or new approaches that are out
there. That's really, really important.
(24:27):
So just, you know, having, if you're going through your
background, you're preparing forinterviews, just that's a
question that I would prepare for and whether it's at CCI or
not because it you're able to also translate things that you
might not seem to be directly applicable, but the process or
some of the skills required is applicable.
(24:48):
And so it's trying to make thoseconnections between the two.
OK. And then one thing I wanted to
ask you just because I saw it onyour LinkedIn, if you don't
mind, is that you're a New York Advisory Board member a career
spring. And when I looked into this,
this was supporting first generation and low income
students breaking into finance. And so my question then is for
(25:12):
those without an existing network, so namely from from
what I've described, what are some practical ways that they
can start to those those first few meaningful connections?
I know it can be super intimidating.
They can feel quite anxious about it.
They might not even know how to go about it.
So what would be some of your tips for for that kind of
(25:32):
community of people? Well.
First of all, align yourself with others that may have
similar interests to you. So clubs at universities are are
incredibly helpful. Usually the clubs may have
different companies that are coming in.
And so anytime there's an informational session, prepare
for that informational session. If it's a company that you're
actually interested in, ask. Interesting question that
(25:57):
demonstrate that you've done theresearch on that company and
stay in touch with those people.Professors are also an amazing
resource, especially each university has them.
They're the ones that typically are going to align with the
outside employers, especially ifyou've had professors that have
worked in the industries that you're interested in.
I don't care if it's finance or any other area, those are
(26:18):
amazing professors to align with.
They they likely have great career advice for you
potentially still connections for you as well.
Anytime you know you have an opportunity to network, try and
take advantage of it and create meaningful relate sustained
relationships. You meet somebody.
(26:39):
It was a good conversation. Follow up with them on LinkedIn.
Try and follow up over time in your internships.
And this is something that I dida training session for students
involved with career Spring lastyear and tips are networking
opportunities. And so you can't always expect
and, and certainly the larger programs at CCI, we set up
(27:01):
plenty of opportunities for you to get to know others in the
program, for you to have cross exposure to different managers,
different areas of the firm. But you can't just rely on that.
You have to show that initiative.
But again, in a meaningful way. Don't just set up the meetings
to set up the meeting. Have a purpose and go into the
meeting with intent of what you want to get out of it, but also
(27:23):
sincerely like information that you want to get out of it as
well. So every opportunity to build a
relationship and to learn along the way is really important.
As an advisor of Prayer Spring, I do have to promote Prayer
Spring as well because it's an amazing, amazing organization.
And if any of you are first generation students in the USI
(27:46):
encourage you to look into Career Spring and, and sign up.
There are advisors there that can help you guide you on a
resume review and interview prep.
They set up plenty of networkingsessions for people as well as
an advisor. People can ping me and set up a
a session where they can talk about anything related to career
(28:07):
advice or even CCI specifically.Yeah, I.
Mean, I, I can speak on this matter from a person who would
have been eligible for this sortof thing in my early kind of
career and, and definitely, you know, I used to not enjoy
networking, but I think, yeah, having a, a place like that, the
organising these events, honestly, the more you do it,
(28:27):
the more you get involved, you know, the more proactive you
are, the more comfortable you get, the more confident you
become. And, and so, yeah, absolutely I
agree. I don't.
Enjoy large networking events. At this point it's almost like
you have to force yourself to doit, similar to those that don't
like speaking in front of large crowds.
And the more you do it, it's like going to the gym and
(28:49):
working out a muscle that you don't really like to work out,
or doing a workout that you don't enjoy.
But those are probably the ones you need the most.
Absolutely. All right, well, look, something
that might be useful for everyone is to close.
I just wondered whether there was a book, a podcast, a
resource, anything that you could, you know, particularly
(29:09):
around this concept of commodities because I know it's
not as kind of talked about accessible online for things
like trading generally and investment banking.
So where would you point people?There are a few books that are
interesting and also so one is the world for sale.
Javier Blas And then another book is Energy Investing and
(29:32):
trading and that covers all facets of the energy industry
between physical trading, financial trading, principal
nesting, which is what we do at at CCI.
There's also the CME Institute, which is helpful to look into.
And then Menta is another sourceto look into as well.
(29:53):
And they hold different courses that you can investigate or
covering different products and areas of the market as well.
I also have a bunch of students here as they're trying to figure
out like different components ofthe market literally going on
YouTube. And there's a lot of information
that's out there as well. So I encourage you guys to look
into it if you are attending ACCI Info session or you're
(30:16):
interested in the firm. Or anything.
Make sure to just be proactive and doing your own research and
you're prepared for those discussions, not just so you
show up that day and you can differentiate yourself, but as
you guys are pursuing your career, like not only are we
interviewing you, but you're interviewing us.
And so just make sure it's something that you're interested
(30:38):
in and your passion, if you are interested, will come through in
the assessment. And just a question I had here.
I was writing a note as you were, you were saying principal
investing. You did mention that earlier,
but I'm again conscious that noteveryone's going to be
completely crystal. And you said CCI is doing
principal investing. So what do you mean by that?
(31:00):
It's. It's similar to private equity
in that we are investing in assets.
So for example we own battery storage facilities, we own power
plants and so we are making thatinvestment.
The difference between US and like a Blackstone, for example,
is Blackstone raises funds in like a five to seven-year time
window, whereas we at CCI have acommitted federal investment
(31:23):
from our investors. And so we can do an acquisition
and we can hold it for much longer than that period of time
or shorter. And so when it comes to how CCI
generates revenue, we have steady revenue from the assets
we own. We can also sell those assets
and that would be a monetizationevent.
(31:45):
And then we have physical trading activity where we're
physically moving products within, let's just say for
example, North America. And then we also do financial
training as well. And all of those are areas where
they collaborate very, very closely with each other because
they're all looking at the energy spectrum.
But they're covering and have information on different
components of what's happening in the market super near term
(32:09):
and what might be happening in aa power plant on a day-to-day
basis. But they're also taking a long
term view on investments. Typically physical trading is
stuff that's happening within like the next three months and
then financial trading can be anywhere between 6 to 18 months
out in the curve. Yeah, I think that.
Explanation is exactly what makes commodities so
(32:30):
interesting, how interconnected it is, how how wide, the kind of
breadth of the investment spectrum as well.
So yeah, absolutely. And many firms only do small
components of it. They'll only have financial
trading or there are private equity firms that have energy as
a partial strategy or just are investing in energy.
And then there are physical shops that really just focus on
(32:52):
physical and the financial trading they're doing is really
just off the back of the physical.
It's not really outright paper trading.
So each shop has different advantages and uniqueness to it
for us, taking advantage of having people that look at the
market with different skill sets, different perspectives.
It's also what makes CCI so interesting because you have all
(33:14):
different skills, personalities,perspectives, experiences and
backgrounds. And to me, that's diversity and
that's what makes it really special and and provides us with
an edge. It's great.
It's a great way to finish. All right, Lauren, thank you so
much for your time and for sharing so openly your your
insights. So thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Commodity trading powers the world and yet most students have
no idea what it actually involves.
So we, in this episode, are aiming to change that.
I'm joined by Lauren Hammond, the global head of talent
strategy at Castleton Commodities International, to
breakdown what makes the commodities industry so unique,
the range of roles available andthe key skills needed to land
(00:23):
them. You can expect practical tips
from this conversation, how to interview well, the traits
employers look for as some greatresources as well to help you
along the way. So let's let's dive in.
Lauren, how are you? Well.
Anthony, thank you so much for having me.
Appreciate it. I think the best place to start
is like I do with all of our guests, it's just for them to
get a sense of who you are. So a little bit of a summary of
(00:45):
your background and and the roleyou have today would be would be
great. Absolutely.
So I effectively fell into HRI, started in recruiting as a
headhunter, so effectively consulting with firms to place
people into various positions. I think similar to what people
experience in consulting, you have an assignment, you complete
(01:09):
the assignment and then you go away and you don't get to see
the results of it. So from there I went in house
and worked at a big bank and then worked at within private
equity at The Blackstone Group and then eventually made my way
here to Castleton. And it's going to be about 15
years in another couple weeks. Wow.
(01:29):
Oh, yeah, congratulations on 15 years.
So This is why I'm, I'm excited about this conversation because
from your description, then there's a whole wealth of
experience here and there's kindof two areas to go into.
One is commodities, because I think it's such an undeserved
area of finance for what kind offinance majors or people
interested in finance or thinking.
And then the second, some of these practical tips that I
(01:51):
mentioned earlier. So perhaps we could start at the
beginning. So what makes working in
commodities feel different from other parts of finance when
we're talking things like investment banking or or trading
in asset management, these sortsof things?
Absolutely. Well, typically in investment
banking or within asset management, there is this longer
(02:11):
path where over time you're given additional
responsibilities and you would play a different role on a
particular deal. For example, within banking,
typically in banking, unless you're at one of the you know
more boutique banks, but even then you're working with a very
large team, you are siloed into doing a particular function and
(02:33):
you're more insular within your particular group within
commodities and in most trading houses or even funds.
Your career growth is more aboutyour business impact, learning
about new products, exploring new methods, being able to if
you migrate into trading, being able to assume more capital or
(02:57):
deploy more risk over time and continuing to evolve your
strategy. So if you're in the front office
here, it is the path where even from a compensation, from a
compensation perspective, but even in terms of your mandate,
the ceiling is much higher and you can get there much faster.
And one of the things I think people appreciate about CCI, and
(03:21):
I certainly do, is it doesn't matter how much experience you
have. There's a reason why we have
campus programs. And I wish more companies took
advantage of this. Technology is changing.
The world is changing really quickly and some amazing ideas
can come with people that don't have prerequisite experience in
our markets. And so you're not pigeon holed
(03:42):
into just having a particular function or being exposed to
particular work because you are junior in terms of your years of
experience. There's always, you know,
different things that people need to do at different stages
of their career as part of the learning path.
But not being pigeon holed and being able to really expand your
(04:04):
your career faster is what's unique to CCI and typically what
would be unique to companies of a particular size within the
markets. Would there would just thinking
what you said there, would therewould be a case where someone
has worked at one of these traditional banks like a sell
side institution in trading and has pivoted to commodities
because I know obviously they docover commodities to some
(04:26):
extent, yeah. Absolutely.
And it's interesting because in a campus recruiting process, and
many of our students are going to experience this in the US,
the recruiting takes place really, really early for
interns. So you can be in your second
year in university and it's the spring semester and that's when
(04:48):
all the big banks with the very large campus recruiting teams
are coming on campus for you to actually take on or secure an
internship for the following summer.
So the summer after your junior year.
And there's a little bit of FOMO, if you will, of many
students that are looking around.
They're going to great universities.
A lot of their, a lot of their other fellow students are
(05:12):
interviewing for these companies.
They're getting offers and they don't want to miss out and they
also want to be able to go home and tell their parents.
I've secured an internship alongthe path now for us and for most
within the alternatives, unless you're very large private equity
or maybe some very, very large multi Strat funds, the majority
(05:33):
of them are going to adhere to astandard campus recruiting
process where you're hiring yourinterns in the fall of their
junior year to start that next quarter.
We would, we explain to people some of the differences in what
the path is within, you know, investment banking.
And it's a really challenging path.
And you can look at any sort of finance memes and go on your
(05:55):
Instagram or go on TikTok and there's a lot to laugh about.
And so it typically is that we would stay in touch with those
types of students and they see the difference.
They see how and I experienced it too.
I wanted to grow faster. I knew I was capable of doing
more. And you're in a banking
structure and it is what it is. It's you that is your time to do
(06:17):
that particular work and it really stunts career growth.
And so for us if we're looking to maybe look to hire from a
bank, we've hired some analysts and and junior traders
typically, although we have hired some more senior risk
takers that would come from banks as well.
The key differentiation, the more senior you get, the more
(06:38):
you're going to get exposure to client flow.
And for us as a fundamental shop, we really need to
differentiate between what is the proprietary trading versus
the flow. The more that you're in the
system, the harder it is also todifferentiate that from our
assessment perspective. But it's also quite challenging
when, you know, moving out of having that information flow
(07:01):
into a shop where you're not going to have that client flow
because we don't have clients. Can I just jump on 2 words that
you're using, that you're using like flow, for example, and
fundamentals? So what are those?
Just for those people who perhaps are from like a, let's
say a STEM background, have never really heard of a lot of
trading terminology. Sure.
(07:22):
And and for our shop, I think that's why it's important to at
least have some type of exposureto economics.
But for us fundamentals are the supply and demand economics of
of what's happening, but also some of the fundamentals could
be related to weather. Some of the things that shift
fundamentals and this is what makes the commodities market so
interesting is there's also macro factors.
(07:45):
So there's macro factors like geopolitical factors.
There are several wars that are going on.
There's energy policy, there's ahuge focus on energy security
right now. And there's also event driven
things. There could be something that is
stated in the news about a particular change.
Of course, there could be thingslike a refinery is down or there
(08:09):
could be other factors like weather is a major, major
factor. So those are some of the inputs
into a model that we would have here.
From a fundamental perspective, flow is more like you have a
very large client. It could be an, let's just
assume an institutional client that is putting on a very, very
large trade and you know that that trade is happening and
(08:32):
you're able to trade off of thatinformation within your
proprietary book knowing that that actually is existing.
Whereas if you're sitting in ourshop, you wouldn't know that
that particular trade is happening because you're not
managing that trade from the institutional client.
That's great. That makes complete sense.
So thank you for that breakdown.And I think when we were talking
(08:54):
on a previous call, I was reallyintrigued by whether or not what
you look for in candidates had changed in the context of
globalization, the rise in data complexity.
Some of those things you mentioned like the weather can
be highly complex in terms of trying to forecast out the
future patterns and so forth. So how has that changed in
recent years of when you're looking for new talent?
(09:18):
Over time, there's been significantly more data
available. And so how are you able to
manage all of that data and put it into a model and be able to
kind of aggregate report etcetera.
And so over time the the rise oftechnical skills across the
board, I think with any company for the most part, we need
(09:40):
increased technical skills to beable to code manipulate data,
etcetera. So that's something that's just
increased with the like significant amount of data
that's required or that's available in the market.
What hasn't changed? Our core things that are going
to make anybody successful here,being a self starter, not being
(10:05):
afraid to make mistakes, you know, having humility, meaning
none of us know all the information, none of us know all
the answers. So having a collaborative
approach to understand if people's different perspectives
and inputting that potentially into your perspectives, being
(10:25):
incredibly hardworking and passionate about the markets.
The people that are really, really successful here live and
breathe. Things happen over the weekend.
They're sending updates to theirteam or to the broader teams
that might even not have, might not have a direct correlation to
the, the trading that the of thestrategy that they're in, but
maybe another strategy. They're just living, living and
(10:46):
breathing it every single day. Yeah, I love that.
And definitely I'm going to probe you more for some of those
characteristics and how young people can develop those.
But maybe before I get to that one thing that you know, the
conversation, naturally, it kindof feels like often people talk
about traders and trading, but you and I both know that there's
(11:07):
way more to a team in terms of different roles, different
responsibilities, risk analytics, so forth.
So I wondered if you could just walk me through those different
roles and how they all kind of come together and within one
team. Yeah.
I, I think Castleton is unique in that no matter what position
you're in here, whether you're in a direct revenue generating
(11:28):
position, meaning trading, or wehave principal investment
activities here as well, or you're working within talent,
what has kept me here for 15 years is being able to be a true
partner to the business. So the more context that you
have on what the business objectives are and then domain
expertise, the better partner you can be.
But typically on a trading desk,it consists of a trading lead or
(11:52):
a desk head. If you call that a portfolio
manager, there may be other traders at varying levels that
would be allocated certain amounts of risk under the
portfolio manager and then thereare analysts as well.
Risk management especially here plays a unique role in
partnering with our businesses. So there the way that we manage,
(12:17):
hedge, identify our risks is keyto our success.
And they are working with each of the trading desk, getting an
understanding of their fundamentals of their positions,
making recommendations so that they work very, very closely.
Same thing with data science andtechnology here.
So we have a fund office development team, we have a data
(12:39):
engineering team that is like cleansing and categorizing data
in the data science scene that'srunning machine learning model.
So it actually one of the great things and this is also an
evolution and what we would lookfor is in the past a lot of
those data science and technology activities existed
more on the trading desk within the analyst role.
And that actually took a lot of time for the analysts.
(13:00):
They could spend 5060 plus percent of their time just
managing data feeds and making sure that those parts were
working. Now it's more how do I enhance
the models? What inputs are missing?
Let me analyze what's happening and make some predictions.
And it allows for more time or capacity to start thinking
about, well, what's the market doing and hopefully getting to
(13:22):
the point where they're startingto think about what's a
potential trade idea. And that's been a huge evolution
here as well. But all of those functions along
with operations, components of finance, they're all working
very, very closely with our trading desk.
And including, for example, if we were to hire a new trader or
a new analyst, we have a team that connects with all of the
(13:46):
other teams to be able to bring that person online and onboard
them faster. And so I'm getting this kind of
culture of collaboration and I know that often in other firms
they have and, and again, perhaps good to explain the
different setups because they can be these isolated pod setups
rather than a more collaborativeteam oriented sharing of
(14:08):
intelligence sort of setup. So yeah, how where does CCI sit
in in contrast to it's competitors in the way that it
supports that talent through their their journey?
It's an incredibly collaborativeculture and that the expectation
is that you're working with colleagues that are going to
(14:29):
help support each other from a trading perspective.
I mean, there are individual trading businesses, you could
call them pods, but in some pod models, those different
strategies are not allowed to communicate with each other.
Here it's expected. And so some information can be
shared there could be, you know,as far as direct trading ideas
(14:51):
shared, or it could be more like, let's celebrate on the
fundamentals of the market. OK, So perhaps we could change
down tact and go a little bit more in towards some of the
things I'm, I'm sure lots of students are really keen to
understand, which is kind of like best practices.
And when you started at the beginning and you were saying
(15:12):
about your career journey all different places you worked.
I think you're a really good person to speak about this type
of topic. So I've just wondered, is there
any kind of something you see with all the time you've you've
come across that you just wishedthat more students followed,
that perhaps they're not doing so at this point in time?
(15:33):
Many students or people that areearlier on in their career,
sometimes they sit back and theyare kind of waiting for people
to give them instructions, information, work if they're not
at full capacity. And it's those that are
proactive, proactive in seeking out work, proactive in seeking
(15:53):
out relationships, information, proactive and sharing ideas.
That's really key. In addition, I mean, I think you
can't teach this. Those that are just hard working
and you can tell that they care.Individuals that are incredibly
detail oriented and also know the balance between being
(16:20):
resourceful and trying to work through problems or a project on
their own or within the team versus looking for, you know the
answer right away, but the balance between that and waiting
too long and heading in the wrong direction.
And so those are the types of things that make people
(16:42):
successful here in general. From a trading perspective, that
makes it a little bit harder. There isn't 1 background.
There wasn't one, you know, educational background or direct
experiences necessarily. If I look at all of the
different successful portfolio managers, traders that we have
here, there's a differentiation educational background and how
(17:05):
they got to where they are. Those things that I said earlier
are all stated, and I do think asense of humility,
identification of mistakes that they've made and the learnings
that happened from that. It's interesting.
I was having a conversation withsome students who are really yet
to start their career and I was talking about the importance of
honesty and, and particularly around when you're working in a
(17:28):
front office role and you know, decisions are being made on the
information flow you're providing.
It's like the integrity of accuracy and honesty is of the
utmost importance. So it's really interesting.
So productivity, resourcefulness, hard working,
detail orientated, they're all top traits.
So you've mentioned to me beforeas well about the proactiveness.
(17:50):
But the other thing I was thinking is the challenge of the
emotional kind of burden of working in an industry like
this, whether in commodities or or any, I guess front office
role in finance. I just wondered whether you had
any practical insights on how young people can start building
up those, those muscles that kind of emotional resiliency,
(18:12):
for example, because a lot of them won't have experience or
perhaps have had a life experience situation yet that
might have naturally brought that.
So what could where could you steer them in order to start
harnessing some of these skills around the emotional challenges
of trade? I think it's putting yourself in
(18:32):
a position to put an idea to start with, like putting an idea
out there and being wrong and going through.
And, and most of the pretty muchevery student that we hire here
has had an incredibly strong educational background to the
point where you're talking to them and they haven't been wrong
(18:53):
many times in their life and going through the emotions of
actually being wrong because as a trader, you're going to be.
It's just how wrong are you? How often, how big was the
trade? And so that could be, you know,
a start of it for us. And I would say if your ambition
is to trade, ask the question ofwhat the potential path would
(19:16):
look like. There are some shops out there
where you might never get an opportunity to trade.
There are some market makers forexample, where you'll be trading
from the beginning, but are you really taught how to make a
sustained career out of it? For us, I almost view it as, and
I have 4 year old so bear with me, but as training wheels.
And so if somebody starts to demonstrate real interest and
(19:40):
aptitude to trading, it's start pitching ideas then from there
and that's showing that you're really understanding what's
happening in the market. You start pitching ideas to your
trader, your portfolio manager. Over time, you may be allocated
a small amount of risk under their book, but you're still
performing for the most part at an analytical role.
(20:01):
But that allows for some time tobe able to learn and go through
the emotions of. The highs and lows of what
happens day-to-day or month to month in a particular market
without also especially earlier in your career feeling like your
bonus is at risk. And so that's the time to really
focus on your approach, to focuson the emotions, to learn about
(20:24):
risk management, which is so keyin trading, and then eventually
get to the point where you're also building a track record for
yourself, knowing that how you've handled particular
situations. And I think experience is
helpful in that. And if you've seen something
before and you may have been emotional before, maybe the
second time, third time around, you're not.
And then eventually getting to the point where you'd have, you
(20:47):
know, a full book for yourself or you're so likely trading
under another trader for severalyears, but you have your own
book in your own Direct Line to it.
So it's having that time to do it.
The emotional piece is somethingthat everybody struggles with.
We've leveraged a coach here where, you know, he also trains,
(21:10):
works with Olympians and about their emotions and regulating.
It's very similar to to going inbasically every single day and
you have one of the biggest contents of your life.
So I certainly wasn't built for that.
And it takes a unique individual.
And so a lot of people come in thinking that that's what they
(21:31):
want to do and that's great. And that's one of the objectives
of the program that we have here.
But analytics and risk management and technology are
the key components of how we aresuccessful over time.
So just because you don't end uptrading at a CCI, you can still
have a fantastic career from just a continuing to build your
(21:55):
experience and impact and also just from a compensation
perspective. So I, I think it's also
understanding what you feel comfortable with.
Like are you willing to live with these types of emotions?
And do you, are you able to stayeven?
Do these types of things bother you or do they not, You know,
how do you, are you able to sleep well at night and, and
(22:15):
manage and regulate yourself? And, and those are things that
can be learned, but they also might not be innate in
everybody. So you have to decide whether
it's OK for you. So you've spoken before about
the value of learning agility, and when you say that, I know
what you mean, but I've never really heard that phrase, I
don't think as such. I just wondered then how do you
(22:39):
spot it in students? What are the signals you look
for? I mean, like you said, you might
be interacting with people who are quite young, quite
inexperienced. So what are some of these early
signals? Because I think it helps for
people to also translate when they're thinking about their
future career decisions. A lot of jobs, they don't even
know what they are and how they exist.
(23:00):
So connecting those dots throughsome of your signals might be
super useful. How would you answer the
question? Give me an example of something
that you've never had prior exposure to, whether in a new
class or in a new area of learning.
How did you go about, you know, coming up to speed on that?
It's one way to measure or just looking at their experiences,
(23:25):
how diversified? Is it a little bit more one note
and like they're pursuing the same thing and just building on
that? Or do they have diversified
interests and experiences withintheir educational background,
within their any sort of prior work history in life in general?
And those are other ways to determine that too.
(23:46):
Because when you're hiring at the grad level, you're
effectively hiring for all thosethings that we talked about
earlier and you're trying to assess and including technical
skill as well. You're also hiring for promise,
right? And, and what is the potential?
And so to me, learning agility is aligned with potential.
(24:06):
The more that you're able to learn because markets are ever
changing, significantly changing.
And so the ability to continue to reinvent yourself, reinvent
your strategy, your approach to things, make sure that you are
aligning with new technology or new approaches that are out
there. That's really, really important.
(24:27):
So just, you know, having, if you're going through your
background, you're preparing forinterviews, just that's a
question that I would prepare for and whether it's at CCI or
not because it you're able to also translate things that you
might not seem to be directly applicable, but the process or
some of the skills required is applicable.
(24:48):
And so it's trying to make thoseconnections between the two.
OK. And then one thing I wanted to
ask you just because I saw it onyour LinkedIn, if you don't
mind, is that you're a New York Advisory Board member a career
spring. And when I looked into this,
this was supporting first generation and low income
students breaking into finance. And so my question then is for
(25:12):
those without an existing network, so namely from from
what I've described, what are some practical ways that they
can start to those those first few meaningful connections?
I know it can be super intimidating.
They can feel quite anxious about it.
They might not even know how to go about it.
So what would be some of your tips for for that kind of
(25:32):
community of people? Well.
First of all, align yourself with others that may have
similar interests to you. So clubs at universities are are
incredibly helpful. Usually the clubs may have
different companies that are coming in.
And so anytime there's an informational session, prepare
for that informational session. If it's a company that you're
actually interested in, ask. Interesting question that
(25:57):
demonstrate that you've done theresearch on that company and
stay in touch with those people.Professors are also an amazing
resource, especially each university has them.
They're the ones that typically are going to align with the
outside employers, especially ifyou've had professors that have
worked in the industries that you're interested in.
I don't care if it's finance or any other area, those are
(26:18):
amazing professors to align with.
They they likely have great career advice for you
potentially still connections for you as well.
Anytime you know you have an opportunity to network, try and
take advantage of it and create meaningful relate sustained
relationships. You meet somebody.
(26:39):
It was a good conversation. Follow up with them on LinkedIn.
Try and follow up over time in your internships.
And this is something that I dida training session for students
involved with career Spring lastyear and tips are networking
opportunities. And so you can't always expect
and, and certainly the larger programs at CCI, we set up
(27:01):
plenty of opportunities for you to get to know others in the
program, for you to have cross exposure to different managers,
different areas of the firm. But you can't just rely on that.
You have to show that initiative.
But again, in a meaningful way. Don't just set up the meetings
to set up the meeting. Have a purpose and go into the
meeting with intent of what you want to get out of it, but also
(27:23):
sincerely like information that you want to get out of it as
well. So every opportunity to build a
relationship and to learn along the way is really important.
As an advisor of Prayer Spring, I do have to promote Prayer
Spring as well because it's an amazing, amazing organization.
And if any of you are first generation students in the USI
(27:46):
encourage you to look into Career Spring and, and sign up.
There are advisors there that can help you guide you on a
resume review and interview prep.
They set up plenty of networkingsessions for people as well as
an advisor. People can ping me and set up a
a session where they can talk about anything related to career
(28:07):
advice or even CCI specifically.Yeah, I.
Mean, I, I can speak on this matter from a person who would
have been eligible for this sortof thing in my early kind of
career and, and definitely, you know, I used to not enjoy
networking, but I think, yeah, having a, a place like that, the
organising these events, honestly, the more you do it,
(28:27):
the more you get involved, you know, the more proactive you
are, the more comfortable you get, the more confident you
become. And, and so, yeah, absolutely I
agree. I don't.
Enjoy large networking events. At this point it's almost like
you have to force yourself to doit, similar to those that don't
like speaking in front of large crowds.
And the more you do it, it's like going to the gym and
(28:49):
working out a muscle that you don't really like to work out,
or doing a workout that you don't enjoy.
But those are probably the ones you need the most.
Absolutely. All right, well, look, something
that might be useful for everyone is to close.
I just wondered whether there was a book, a podcast, a
resource, anything that you could, you know, particularly
(29:09):
around this concept of commodities because I know it's
not as kind of talked about accessible online for things
like trading generally and investment banking.
So where would you point people?There are a few books that are
interesting and also so one is the world for sale.
Javier Blas And then another book is Energy Investing and
(29:32):
trading and that covers all facets of the energy industry
between physical trading, financial trading, principal
nesting, which is what we do at at CCI.
There's also the CME Institute, which is helpful to look into.
And then Menta is another sourceto look into as well.
(29:53):
And they hold different courses that you can investigate or
covering different products and areas of the market as well.
I also have a bunch of students here as they're trying to figure
out like different components ofthe market literally going on
YouTube. And there's a lot of information
that's out there as well. So I encourage you guys to look
into it if you are attending ACCI Info session or you're
(30:16):
interested in the firm. Or anything.
Make sure to just be proactive and doing your own research and
you're prepared for those discussions, not just so you
show up that day and you can differentiate yourself, but as
you guys are pursuing your career, like not only are we
interviewing you, but you're interviewing us.
And so just make sure it's something that you're interested
(30:38):
in and your passion, if you are interested, will come through in
the assessment. And just a question I had here.
I was writing a note as you were, you were saying principal
investing. You did mention that earlier,
but I'm again conscious that noteveryone's going to be
completely crystal. And you said CCI is doing
principal investing. So what do you mean by that?
(31:00):
It's. It's similar to private equity
in that we are investing in assets.
So for example we own battery storage facilities, we own power
plants and so we are making thatinvestment.
The difference between US and like a Blackstone, for example,
is Blackstone raises funds in like a five to seven-year time
window, whereas we at CCI have acommitted federal investment
(31:23):
from our investors. And so we can do an acquisition
and we can hold it for much longer than that period of time
or shorter. And so when it comes to how CCI
generates revenue, we have steady revenue from the assets
we own. We can also sell those assets
and that would be a monetizationevent.
(31:45):
And then we have physical trading activity where we're
physically moving products within, let's just say for
example, North America. And then we also do financial
training as well. And all of those are areas where
they collaborate very, very closely with each other because
they're all looking at the energy spectrum.
But they're covering and have information on different
components of what's happening in the market super near term
(32:09):
and what might be happening in aa power plant on a day-to-day
basis. But they're also taking a long
term view on investments. Typically physical trading is
stuff that's happening within like the next three months and
then financial trading can be anywhere between 6 to 18 months
out in the curve. Yeah, I think that.
Explanation is exactly what makes commodities so
(32:30):
interesting, how interconnected it is, how how wide, the kind of
breadth of the investment spectrum as well.
So yeah, absolutely. And many firms only do small
components of it. They'll only have financial
trading or there are private equity firms that have energy as
a partial strategy or just are investing in energy.
And then there are physical shops that really just focus on
(32:52):
physical and the financial trading they're doing is really
just off the back of the physical.
It's not really outright paper trading.
So each shop has different advantages and uniqueness to it
for us, taking advantage of having people that look at the
market with different skill sets, different perspectives.
It's also what makes CCI so interesting because you have all
(33:14):
different skills, personalities,perspectives, experiences and
backgrounds. And to me, that's diversity and
that's what makes it really special and and provides us with
an edge. It's great.
It's a great way to finish. All right, Lauren, thank you so
much for your time and for sharing so openly your your
insights. So thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
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