Levent Yilmaz
Levent entered the commodity world in the family-owned retail precious metal (gold) business working first in the sales department and later as a general manager.
While studying economics & finance at university, he was managing his own global equity portfolio based on fundamental and technical analysis.
After university, he was employed by Aktiencheck.de AG as an equity analyst and private placement marketer. He managed to raise within a year USD 15 million venture capital funds for start-up firms and acquired new clients and investors through online marketing campaigns.
He then joined S&P Capital IQ as European Banking Equity Analyst in London. He advised institutional investors on the sell side on their asset allocation through company valuations and management interviews. He succeeded after only one year, in outperforming the S&P European banking index by 6% p.a.
He then moved to Hadron Capital LLP (multi-strategy hedge fund; USD 300million AuM) in London as an Investment Analyst responsible for sourcing investment opportunities in the European equity, high yield bond and distressed debt markets, using recovery analysis, DCF valuation and bond document analysis while assisting the founders in the management of the company's bond and equity portfolio, which yielded a return of 25% p.a.
At Constellation Energy Commodities Group in London, he was responsible for the coal and freight market analysis. He modeled supply-and-demand balance, did marginal cost curve assessment and was responsible for technical analysis. He then came up with a game plan consisting of locational spreads/intra-commodity / inter-commodity spread trades. He also advised the power portfolio managers with regards to dark spread and spark spread hedging.
He then got promoted as a coal and dry bulk freight proprietary trader with Vattenfall Energy Trading in Copenhagen, with a VAR of USD 1million and with a profit target of 10 times VAR. He traded API2, API4, Newcastle, Cape, Panamax spreads and outright.
He carried on his proprietary trading of coal (API2, API4, Newcastle) with CEZ in Prague and coal/oil (Brent, WTI and heating oil) at Innovative Energy in Frankfurt. He managed a book with a VAR limit of EUR 1million and targeted 10 times his VAR limit.
Levent studied business management and economics at University Siegen and Hagen with a focus on finance and economics. He received the Bank Risk Management Certificate from Moody’s-KMV and the Trader Certificate from the European Energy Exchange.
Levent is passionate about financial markets and geopolitics. He is fluent in English, German and Turkish. He likes salsa and sailing.