Traders who handle volatility well rarely have better instincts than others. They usually just have better information, sooner.
There has never been more pressure on speed than right now. The US-Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February triggered what the International Energy Agency is calling the largest oil supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, halting roughly 20% of global oil and LNG flows. Brent has surged above $100 a barrel, up more than 40% in under three weeks. Analysts are warning openly of $200 oil prices if the conflict drags on. The IEA has responded with its largest ever emergency reserve release, 400 million barrels, and prices are still rising. This is not a volatility spike. It is a structural market event unfolding in real time.
Most trading desks are still not set up for this. A CTRM or spreadsheet open in one window. A news terminal somewhere else. A P&L report compiled after the session. When an escalation, a central bank response, or a supply disruption breaks during the session, the desk spends the first critical minutes piecing together what it means rather than acting on it. By the time they have, the window has often closed.
That is the problem we built Loqsea to fix. And it is precisely why we integrated LiveSquawk.
We founded Loqsea in London in 2019 with one ambition: build a cloud-based commodity trading and risk management (CTRM) platform that genuinely serves active trading desks, not one designed around back-office compliance and adapted for the front office as an afterthought.
The result is a unified risk manager where live P&L, real-time positions, Greeks, and VaR are all visible in one place, updated continuously as the market moves. By automating trade capture via FIX connectivity and eliminating manual reconciliation, we remove the operational drag and spreadsheet reliance that slow down decision-making.
Whether it’s replacing formula-heavy calculations with our Online Pricing Sheets for instant price discovery or using our Execution Engine to connect systematic strategies directly to live markets, we focus on helping firms stay ahead of the market, not just react to it.
We work with CTAs, hedge funds, market makers, and cross-commodity trading firms. In 2025, Chartis Research ranked us #25 in the Energy50, which recognises the most influential technology providers in the commodity sector. We are also an ICE, CME and LME approved Independent Software Vendor, giving our trading clients direct, live verified connectivity to exchanges.
LiveSquawk is a professional real-time news service trusted by traders and risk managers across financial and commodity markets. It monitors thousands of sources and surfaces only showing you the headlines that move prices: central bank decisions, OPEC+ announcements, geopolitical breaking news, supply disruptions.
What makes the Loqsea integration distinctive is where LiveSquawk lives within the platform. Headlines appear directly on the homepage, running alongside live positions and P&L by book, and upcoming expiry data. When a story breaks, your team sees it immediately and can click straight through to the full article without leaving the platform or opening another tab. The news is there. The numbers it affects are right next to it.
Some of our clients were already using LiveSquawk before it became part of Loqsea, running it on a second screen or separate device alongside the platform. The problem was the gap: reading a headline, then navigating back to understand what it meant for their current exposure. When OPEC+ moved to increase output in direct response to the Iran conflict, or when analysts began flagging a potential 1970s-style energy shock from a prolonged Strait closure, that gap had a measurable cost. We closed it.
The Loqsea homepage is designed around a single principle: give your team a complete picture of the trading day the moment they open the platform. Live P&L by book, real-time positions, MTM exposure, futures expiries, and LiveSquawk headlines, all in one view. When something breaks in the market, your traders see it immediately and can look across to understand what it means for their current exposure. The decision of whether to act happens in seconds, not after a round trip across multiple systems.
That is not a minor workflow improvement. In sessions where a single headline can move an entire book, having live market news and real-time risk analytics in the same field of view is the difference between a desk that is informed and a desk that is reactive.
Commodity traders and risk managers are operating in conditions with no recent precedent. A major geopolitical conflict is directly threatening one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints. Tariff policy continues to shift with little warning. Volatility across energy and commodity markets is demanding a different quality of attention from every desk.
Staying informed used to mean reading the morning report before the session opened. That is no longer enough. The news that matters to your positions can break at any point during the day, move prices double digits within an hour, and render yesterday’s risk view immediately obsolete.
The desks managing this well are not necessarily the largest or the most experienced. They are the ones who have closed the distance between intelligence and exposure, so that when something breaks, they are acting on it rather than catching up to it.
Now more than ever, that is not a nice-to-have. It is the baseline for managing risk well. And it is exactly what this partnership is built around.
Talk to our team!
Schedule a demo and we will walk you through the platform in the context of how your desk actually runs.
