PROFILE: Breaking Through: Brynne Kelly, Part 1

Traders Magazine Online News, November 2, 2017

Kara Grygotis

As part of the series “Breaking Through: How Three Women Took on the World of Trading,” Trading Technologies shared with Traders Magazine the second profile installment interviewing female trading pioneers. In the first spotlight, TT spoke with Margie Teller, who navigated her way through the CME trading pits to become a floor trading Hall of Famer.

This second profile is with Brynne Kelly, a woman who has taken a far different route through the trading industry via merchant trading.

Kara Grygotis: Let’s talk about your history—how you actually got into trading, and the progression of what you were doing from a trading standpoint.

Brynne Kelly: People ask me about my background a lot, and I think it’s partly because they are looking for some sort of “recipe”…and yet, if you hear my background, you will find that none of the ingredients seem to make sense, but somehow the end-product works.

I grew up in Minnesota and went to the University of Minnesota. I did a year of my undergraduate studies in England and ultimately graduated with a finance degree. Eventually, I also obtained enough additional accounting credits to qualify to sit for the CPA exam, which I passed. 

I have always said over the years that it’s not where you went to school, but what you make of it. I think that’s the unique part—the cumulation of experience that I was fortunate enough to get after I graduated. It’s interesting to people because my experience was rooted in the merchant side of the business, which is less understood than its counterparts like floor trading or hedge funds.

Kara: Can you explain what you mean by merchant?

Brynne: Merchant trading is usually, but not always, embedded into a larger company that owns commodity assets. In my case, I worked for companies that are heavily invested in energy assets and operate those assets as their core business. The reason merchant trading evolves at these companies is, in part, due to their experience and level of comfort with physical commodity logistics. Being involved in moving products from point A to point B in the operation of their assets, they see the opportunity to leverage their knowledge beyond asset operation to a trading business that is unencumbered by the day-to-day operations of their assets. In this way, these trading groups are fundamentally based on logistics.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of risk involved in that type of trading business. In fact, you could argue that there is more risk, since these trading portfolios usually contain a significant amount of off-hub structured transactions that have the added layer of performance risk. It’s one thing to lay off risk using liquid futures; it’s another thing to preserve margin as you unwind financial hedges into delivery.

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