Shipping's leading analysts and brokers are again pitting their wits against each other in a bid to be named fantasy football champion of 2020/2021.
The online competition involves picking and managing a team of English Premier League players who are awarded points for their performances in real matches.
The Shipping Research Fantasy Football League was started by Vivek Srivastava, a shipping economist and strategist who has worked for Heidmar and SSY, and who jokingly calls it an "irrelevant pastime".
He told TradeWinds: "I am very proud of it. I started it eight seasons ago, when there were only 12 of us in the league.
"It has grown steadily ever since and last season we had 42 people! Which also allows me to dish out more prize money."
The player to beat is last season's champion Lars Kirkeby, who runs fixed income funds at Landkreditt Forvaltning but who used to be a bond analyst at Nordea.
He is the only person so far to have won it twice, having also been champion in 2016/2017.
Espen Landmark Fjermestad, who is head of research at Fearnley Securities, won in 2015/16 and Mats Olimb, a project broker at NRP in Norway, triumphed 12 months before that.
Different approaches pay off
"Interestingly, Lars tends to pick his squad at the start of the season and hardly makes a change from week to week, demonstrating the long-term patient approach of a typical bond investor," Srivastava said.
"Whereas Espen is more of a 'tinkerman', often making more than the permitted number of transfers and sacrificing points, like a high-frequency equities trader."
Srivastava said team names often tend to riff on the names of popular players.
Mark Smith from World Fuel Services is the boss this season of Boom Xhakalaka, which manages to combine an old Shaggy song and Arsenal's walking yellow-card-of-a-captain, Granit Xhaka.
Smith had a brilliant name last year: Game of Throw Ins. The year before, it was Pique Blinders, a homage both to the cult BBC TV show and increasingly immobile Barcelona defender Gerard Pique.
Christian Waldegrave from Teekay came up with Gylfi Pleasure, Ben Woodbridge from GFI had a squad called Mo Mane Mo Problems and Luke Ravenscroft from SSY — the son of AM Nomikos' Mark Ravenscroft — came up with Me, My Delph and I.
The league kicks off when the real action starts again on 12 September.
Players from far and wide
"Over our first seven, 77 people have participated, mainly from the shipbroking, investment banking and fund management communities, but with a sprinkling from other sectors," Srivastava said.
Participants come from as far and wide as Singapore and Guildford, with consistently strong representation from Oslo.
He added: "It produces some fascinating rivalries and was always a source of heated debate whenever two or more of us met at a shipping conference or industry event (remember those?)."
The league is open to everyone connected with shipping research, however tangentially.
There are winners and runners-up prizes, and also cash for being the best manager of any given month.
