OVERVIEW
Positive Energy was founded in July 2025 by Lukas Sidlauskas, an experienced distillates trader.
Starting from scratch, Positive Energy aims to become an established player in the market, providing liquidity across the whole barrel.
Starting a new desk, let alone a new company, is no easy feat and the last thing Founder Lukas needed was to be worried about technology. What Positive Energy needed was a turn-key solution that required no upfront implementation cost and no lengthy implementation period.
For a market maker who can expect to execute hundreds or thousands of trades a day, knowing your exact position is of paramount importance. But in the voice-brokered oil markets that Positive Energy trades there can be a delay of up to 15 minutes between the moment the trade is agreed and it then being posted to the exchange for clearing.
These trades must be manually entered by the broker into the exchange’s block trade system. This is a potential source of errors and mistakes do happen. Incorrectly booked trades are much easier to fix on the same day rather than the next but manual reconciliation is time consuming and error-prone. Positive Energy’s clearers also have a record of trades done and positions held and these too need to be reconciled each day. Discrepancies can result in unexpected positions or losses. In either case, Lukas needs to be focused on trading, not on admin.
When it comes to viewing the position, many existing off-the-shelf solutions group positions by contract. But for market makers, who trade different contracts that net off against each other, this is little better than a list of trades. Positive Energy needs a way to see their flat price risk as well a way to quickly see expiring positions.
As a new business, Positive Energy cannot afford to have things go wrong and their technology is no exception. They need reliability and fast, responsive support if something doesn’t seem right.
Catalyst is a trader-first risk system for energy traders, provided as a subscription service. We agreed a go-live date with Lukas and stuck to it, with no implementation time or additional costs.
In most cases, Catalyst can be deployed to new clients within 1 working day.
Our intuitive blotter allows Positive Energy to enter voice trades agreed with a broker in seconds. Each section of the blotter allows for customisation to give the user the flexibility to enter their trades as quickly as possible. We also offer a multi-unit price optimiser to show the best leg prices when trading two products in different units, e.g. the Gasoil EFS trade.
Catalyst is a certified ISV for trade capture with ICE, CME, TT and Trayport. All block trades and screen trades are captured by our feed. It takes less than 250 ms from receipt of trade confirmation to the user’s position screen. Zero lag, instant clarity.
All this means Lukas always knows his position and can trade with confidence.
No manual work to reconcile blottered trades with the exchange trade confirmations is required. Catalyst has an automatic matching system capable of handling complex multi-leg trades and multiple fills. On average it takes less than 100 ms to link matching trades removing this time-consuming and error-prone task from Positive Energy’s to-do list.
Any discrepancies between manually entered trades and the exchange trade confirms are easy to spot, allowing Positive Energy to work with their brokers to fix any mis-booked trades immediately. Catalyst retains a full position history back to inception and allows the user to upload their daily clearer files and then performs an automatic reconciliation between them, highlighting any breaks.
The live position grid shows underlying price risk against expiry date, contract month, and, in the case of oil swaps, future equivalent contract month. All positions are decomposed and rebuilt so that contracts that net off against each other are reflected, e.g. a Gasoil East/West contract will create positions in both the 10ppm Sing and LSGO (Swap) columns.
Positions are also decomposed down to the smallest expiry unit. In the case of oil swaps this means days, allowing the user to see true price risk during the expiry month as days are priced.
Catalyst has an Excel plugin which allows Positive Energy to stream prices directly into Catalyst. These prices are used in the live mark-to-market PnL. There is also a full daily PnL history so Lukas can track the performance of every aspect of Positive Energy over time.
The Catalyst team is based in London, UK and provides support from an hour before the Singapore window until 30 minutes after the US window. We are always just a call or text away.
- Over 15,000 trades resulting in over $1M gross PnL since inception
- 0 trades missed due to downtime
- 0 bad trades made due to incorrect information
- 0 hours a week spent manually reconciling trades or positions
Positive Energy started trading on 1st August 2025 and Catalyst has been there since the start.
Because he knows the position he sees on his screen is accurate and up-to-date, Lukas can trade with conviction, not letting PnL sit on the table because of missed opportunities.
Instead of spending his time doing automatable admin tasks, Lukas spends it trading and growing his business. Positive Energy is looking to grow to 3 traders by its 1 year anniversary and Catalyst stands ready to support that growth.
"It’s a ‘traders first’ platform. It’s built for traders and trading, that’s the focus. As a trader who spends 10 hours a day on it, that's a real plus".
- Lukas Sidlauskas, Positive Energy Trading