Reports The Use of Spreadsheets in Commodity Trading | Page 4

The Use of Spreadsheets in Commodity Trading – 2015

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Introduction
The use of spreadsheets within the commodity trading and commodity management business functions
and organizations is considered, at least anecdotally,
to be almost ubiquitous. Despite the widespread understanding of the many and varied risks associated
with the use of these unsecure and isolated pools of
data and analysis, the use of spreadsheets by personnel across most functions within commodity trading and management firms remains very common
and widespread. This continues, despite a number of
highly publicized incidents within the commodity and
financial trading sectors in which the use of erroneous spreadsheet data has been directly tied to large
financial losses.

With the emergence and maturing of vendor-supplied commercially available CTRM and ERP
systems, many in the industry believed that spreadsheets would become unnecessary, as these sophisticated and comprehensive systems could provide the
necessary capabilities to eliminate their use in areas
such as positi