About

I'm Manraj Bains, a trader and researcher working mostly in energy. I'm currently reading for an MSc in Finance at Cranfield University.

My first trade was a soybean contract. I was fourteen, and I haven't really stopped since. Commodities first, then FX, then equities; these days most of my risk sits in equity options.

I love macro, using top-down analysis to understand how the whole board is moving before forming a view. I've built a research system around that called the Convergence Chain. It takes a real system, an energy grid, a drug supply chain, a country's payment rails, and maps how it actually works: the parts, what flows into what, who owns and regulates each step, and where the whole thing leans on a handful of players with no substitute. Because the map is a graph, graph theory finds the choke points rather than my own judgement, and every node, link and fact has to trace back to a document you can open. What comes out is a verified structural map, plus an honest register of what it went looking for and couldn't prove. I'll post the maps here when I run it on something.

The other half is microstructure. I like watching the flow: reading the tape, and following where capital actually goes. Sometimes that's order flow on a screen, sometimes it's capex commitments buried in a filing. Either way it tells you what people are doing rather than what they're saying.

For the past two years I've worked in energy M&A, across renewable energy and power markets. That's most of what ends up here: what's shifting in the landscape, any deals worth a second look, and where the public and private sides of the market are pricing things differently. They disagree more often than you'd expect, and that gap is usually the interesting bit.

What's here

• Research. Longer pieces where I work a thesis out properly. Macro, energy, market structure. These are the ones with the charts.
• Reports. Sector and deal coverage, usually with the full PDF attached.
• Notes. Shorter. A tape read, a print that didn't make sense, a chart worth ten minutes.
• Publications. Formal and external writing.

Zico and Messi

Get in touch

I'm on LinkedIn and X, and I post there when something new goes up here.

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Nothing on this site is investment advice, and nothing here represents the views of any employer, past or present. It's my own work, written in my own time.