Show notes
This episode was filmed on Thursday, March 12, 2026.
Greg Newman, founder and CEO of Onyx Capital Group and the largest liquidity provider in oil derivatives markets, on what it actually looks like to run a market-making book when liquidity breaks down entirely. What most participants misunderstand about oil vol is that the outright price — Brent, WTI — is a proxy, not the market; the real information lives in time spreads, regional diffs, and niche contracts that only a handful of firms have visibility into. Why fair value discovery in a dislocated market requires abandoning automation, reverting to manual process, and using physical market participant behavior — refiners, producers, airlines — as a real-time signal rather than a lagged one.
Greg co-founded Onyx Capital Group in 2016 after a decade trading crude and refined products across increasingly niche oil derivatives contracts. Onyx built its position by stepping into the vacuum left by banks exiting commodities post-Volcker, becoming the dominant liquidity provider across European, Middle Eastern, and Asian oil markets with an estimated 20–50% market share in several key contracts. The firm now operates market-making desks across London, New York, Dubai, and Singapore, and has expanded into data services, a single-dealer platform, retail brokerage, and physical trade finance — building a vertically integrated oil markets infrastructure business from a pure prop-trading foundation.
In this episode we cover:
• Why trading oil outrights during the dislocation was a losing game — and where the real edge was
• Fair value discovery on Sunday night: how Onyx priced contracts when every historical model broke
• Physical market reflexivity: how refiners, producers, and airlines all become forced actors at key price levels
• Geopolitical signal extraction: options open interest and off-hours order flow as an information edge over Polymarket
• Regime-break risk: why government intervention in exchange mechanisms is the tail risk that keeps Greg up at night
• Countercyclical talent investment and why Onyx's worst years built its best crisis infrastructure
• From prop shop to platform: data, single-dealer, retail brokerage, and credit as extensions of liquidity edge
• Why Onyx is building toward a hedge fund — and why track record discipline is holding them back
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:48 Oil market volatility: making sense of the dislocation
04:05 Outright vs. spread positioning: where the real edge was
05:10 How Onyx manages process when liquidity breaks down
10:18 Pricing fair value on Sunday night with no precedent
16:48 Physical market participants and the reflexivity of hedging behavior
20:22 Prediction markets as an information signal — and why Onyx stopped using them
25:26 Options flow as the real tell for informed geopolitical positioning
28:17 What it feels like running a global market-making book through a crisis
33:05 Regime-break risk: when exchange mechanisms themselves fail
36:25 Countercyclical investment in talent and infrastructure
42:20 From prop shop to liquidity infrastructure: building a durable valuation
48:50 Why Onyx is building a hedge fund — and what's holding them back
57:50 Media, brand, and market disruption as compounding assets
01:05:47 The most surprising thing after 14 years of building Onyx
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