New ideas for the Asian market: bitumen hedging

摘要

One of the speakers at the Argus Asian Bitumen conference in Singapore was Ashkat Jaswal, a senior risk management consultant with INTL FCStone. He was talking to the conference about bitumen hedging, which allows buyers or sellers of bitumen to take the risk out of fluctuating bitumen prices. Though large Asian refineries and traders do hedge -"it's in their DNA,"- most, said Jaswal, who is based in Singapore, "The medium sized guys predominantly don't hedge," he said. "The conference was an opportunity to educate people about how to start managing risk. "What I found out from the conference was that it's not something people are looking at or have even been told about." Sellers and traders in Japan may be hedging, added Jaswal, but players in UAE, Indonesia and Malaysia don't.