It writes the mechanism, not the event.
Independent research on the seam where energy, finance and geopolitics meet — the tanker rerouted in the night, the refinery run cut nobody reported, the central-bank decision that will move a cargo three weeks from now, sitting quietly unpriced while the rest of the feed reads yesterday’s headline.
Live from the working data
714 vessel positions from the latest AIS capture, and prices from the same published data behind data.kardamow.com. Terrestrial AIS, so empty ocean means no receiver rather than no ships.
Recent writing
Full archive →What it covers
Three areas, each the same question asked of a different set of pipes: where does the physical market quietly disagree with the paper one, and how long before the paper is forced to notice?
Energy fundamentals and physical markets
The crude curve first — backwardation, contango, and the term-structure dislocations that signal where the physical market disagrees with paper — then LNG and gas across JKM, TTF and Henry Hub, and the cargo routing that shows where tightness is real and where it is only narrative.
Crack spreads tell you what the market expects; run cuts tell you what refiners actually believe. When the two detach, take the run cut — a refiner who pulls throughput has voted with a plant, not a forecast.
Geopolitics, trade and macro
Sanctions architecture and the enforcement gaps beneath it. Sovereign risk and the chain that carries a basis-point move in Treasuries through the dollar, through EM currencies, through import economics, and into physical demand.
Policy moves the molecule on a lag and the market prices the policy on the day. The gap between those two clocks is where a sanctions regime is either enforced or quietly routed around — so track the workaround, not the designation.
Infrastructure and the transition
Pipeline and export-terminal capacity, and the basis differentials that throughput constraints create when ambition outruns steel. Dark spreads, spark spreads and dispatch order — which fuel actually clears the merit order.
Steel is slower than capital and capital is slower than belief, so every transition story eventually becomes a bottleneck story — and the bottleneck, once it binds, sets the price for everything queued behind it.
Who writes this
I write under a pen name, and I work the seam between two desks that, in most institutions, barely speak to each other. I came up through fixed income — the whole life of a trade, from execution through settlement to the risk numbers behind it — and carried that into energy economics.
I put the two together because the questions worth asking kept living in the space between them, and because the settlement side is where I learned to see that transmission first: a trade that fails to settle, a margin call that lands a day early, a letter of credit that stops clearing all show up in the back office weeks before they show up in a price.
I learned the plumbing of both markets from the back office forward, which is the direction in which the plumbing actually leaks.
The frame
The work rests on two foundations and refuses to choose between them. Reflexivity — that what participants believe feeds back into the thing they imagine they are merely measuring — and the physical mechanics of the trade: the cargo, the freight, the war-risk premium, the regasification slot, the breakeven at which floating storage stops paying its carry.
Reflexivity with no contact with the molecule is a seminar. A flow desk with no model of why beliefs move is a price feed with no memory. Kardamow lives at the join — close enough to know how a barrel actually moves, far enough back to see the belief that is moving it.
“Kardamow maps where energy, geopolitics, and finance intersect before the market prices it in. Riko tracks the structural imbalances most analysts miss — sanctions gaps, cargo routing decisions, the lag between policy and physical trade.”
“Real primary-source work — built the Kharg loading data himself and got the corridor argument right before most people had the numbers.”
“A sharp, independent Substack exploring the crossroads of energy markets, finance, and geopolitics. Clear-eyed analysis of how power, capital, and resources shape the global economic landscape.”
What it costs
Each note is built to do one thing: make the rest of your morning feed redundant.
Previews of every piece, and the occasional one unlocked in full — enough to judge the method on the mechanism rather than the marketing.
Every publication and the complete archive back to 2024, including the long-form synthesis behind the weekday work.
The founding tier. Everything in Pro, plus a direct line — one-to-one on the markets, and the questions that do not fit a comment thread.
Group access runs at twenty-five per cent off for four or more seats — built for desks, funds and family offices. For institutional terms, riko@kardamow.com.
Get in touch
For inquiries, collaboration, or a good-faith exchange of ideas — including a good-faith disagreement worth having.
Everything published by Kardamow is for informational purposes only and reflects the author’s own views. Not a licensed investment professional, a registered adviser or a broker-dealer; nothing here is financial advice, a recommendation to enter any trade, or a solicitation to buy or sell any asset.