David Kang — FX, rates, oil, coal, LNG: thirty years of commodity risk, and the producer hedge an airline ran

An airline buys fuel.It also sells it.

I'm David Kang. I noticed. Then, as Group Treasurer of Qatar Airways, I hedged the way a producer hedges instead of the way an airline does, and the book made US$130 million in five months. Nobody has copied it since. It stayed inside the airline for fourteen years, long enough for every number to pass through the audited accounts and the method to go through peer review. In October 2026 Bloomberg's Odd Lots asked me how it worked, and I told them.

That was one trade. The thirty years around it are FX, interest rates, oil broked and structured, jet fuel, coal, LNG, and lately funds and ETFs — seven markets, six desks I'd never sat at before I was asked to. Each one began the same way: a book I hadn't run, a problem nobody had named, a date. The one thing I'd claim is that I learn a market fast enough to be useful before the deadline.

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What I do

Companies dig the same five holes. I've stood in all of them.

Boards call when a number they didn't understand becomes a number they can't explain. These are the five I keep finding. What I do about each is in the full story.

The hedge that doubled the bet

You buy a commodity, so you bought protection. But your pricing passes the cost through, which means you were never short. Oil falls, the surcharge falls, and the hedge loses too.

Career insurance on the P&L

Nobody gets fired for buying calls at the top. The premium protects the treasurer, not the company.

The exposure nobody owns

Procurement buys it, sales prices it, treasury hedges a proxy for it, and the gap leaks out of the P&L under a different name every quarter.

The basis you didn't know you were taking

You burn jet fuel and hedge Brent. For years the gap sat still; then it moved 40 points in a week and the hedge paid out on the wrong thing.

The product that doesn't exist yet

A commodity fund, an ETF, a structured hedge for your clients. You know what it should do; nobody in the building has built one.

The full story: three years in Doha told properly, how the five holes get dug out, and thirty years of oil read from the chair I was in.

A US$360 million hole and the way out of it. Dubai at five dollars, the $147 barrel, the smoke off a Kalimantan stockpile, the Sleipnir at Tuas, and what happens in the first forty-five minutes if we meet.

It sits behind a door: you'll be asked for your email and sent a six-digit code. That's deliberate — it keeps the bots out and lets you in. Once per device per month.

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