About us
Guidingprinciples
The discipline of a financial institution. The reach of a global merchant. Since 1990.
About
TheFirm
Hermes Management is a Swiss trading and investment house for energy and metals, active in the markets since 1990. We combine two identities that rarely sit in one house: the balance-sheet discipline of a financial institution and the market reach of a commodities merchant.
We are privately held and conservative by construction. We do not publish league tables or scale comparisons; our counterparties know us by our conduct, our documentation and our settlement record. What we will say is what we do: we trade physical commodities, we finance their movement, we acquire the assets behind them, and we advise their owners.
Our position
A trading house that behaves like a lender, and a lender that knows what the cargo weighs. That combination decides which risks we accept, how we document them, and why we are still trading with counterparties we met three decades ago.
Physical first
We take title, charter the freight and carry the inventory. Paper is a hedge on a real position, never a substitute for one.
Balance sheet behind the trade
Own capital, committed bank lines and structured trade finance let us pre-pay producers and extend terms where others cannot.
Difficult geographies, documented
The Atlantic basin, the Gulf, West and Southern Africa, Latin America and Asia – underwritten on the ground, with origin and sanctions evidence on file.
Principles
- 01Discipline before opportunity.No transaction is attractive enough to relax our standards.
- 02Discretion as standard.We speak precisely and rarely; our counterparties' business remains their business.
- 03Risk owned at the source.Every exposure has a name, a limit and a hedge.
- 04Relationships measured in decades.We optimise for the twentieth transaction, not the first.
- 05Independence.Privately held since inception, we answer to our own balance sheet.
Compliance
Compliance&responsibletrading
We treat compliance as infrastructure, not paperwork. Hermes maintains know-your-counterparty and anti-money-laundering procedures aligned with Swiss standards, and screens counterparties, cargoes and financing structures against applicable international sanctions regimes before commitment.
In metals and energy flows we apply responsible-sourcing principles and expect the same of our counterparties. Documentation supporting our procedures is available to banking partners and counterparties in the course of due diligence.