Cargo Desk: A Physical Trading Desk Game
After spending a few months in physical refined metals trading, I got the big picture of how the mysterious physical commodities world works from the inside.
I vibe coded this game with inspiration from how I saw allocation decisions being made live on the desk.
Cargo Desk
It’s a game that puts you in the seat of a trader making allocation decisions on a physical metals trading desk.
You hold long-term purchase and sales contracts. Between them sit a warehouse, limited working capital, the spot market, and the LME and CME forward curves.
The Game:
- New information arrives: cargoes become available, customers nominate demand, the curves move, freight and news change.
- You allocate by dragging supply cargoes onto customer contracts, blend off-spec metal, store, buy or sell spot, hedge the basis, or run a CME/LME arbitrage route.
- You lock the book.
- The round resolves and a P&L waterfall shows exactly what made or lost money and why.
Every allocation is a bet. The obvious cargo might cover a demanding customer now, but using high-grade material today can leave a future order uncovered. A cheap cargo might arrive late. A big visible CME-LME spread can turn out to be unprofitable after freight, conversion and financing.
Try it!
You can play the prototype here:
→ Cargo Desk (playable prototype)
Work in Progress
Keep checking back because this project is very much a work in progress.
In particular, I feel like at the moment it’s a bit too clunky. In fact,it’s actually giving trading assessment vibes :P (cough, if you are a trading house looking to develop this further as an aptitude test for hiring, feel free to reach out)
Feel free to write me a Linkedin message if you have any suggestions: