Glencore (Marc Rich & Co)

Marc Rich and Pincus Green left Philipp Brothers in 1974 and built a trading house on spot-market crude, dealing through embargoes on Iran, South Africa and Cuba until a 1983 US indictment sent Rich into Swiss exile. Management bought him out in 1994, renamed the firm Glencore, listed it in 2011 and merged it with Xstrata to put mines behind the trading book. Readers get how physical traders earn on location, time and quality arbitrage at thin margins on enormous turnover, financed almost entirely with short-term bank credit, and how far some of them went for access, which produced Glencore's roughly $1.1 billion US bribery and market-manipulation settlement in 2022. Daniel Ammann wrote Rich's own account of his methods, and Blas and Farchy set the firm inside the wider history of the trading houses.

2 books