Greek finance boss Iraklis Sbarounis is off to a flyer in the only shipping market that really matters — fantasy football league.
The Okeanis Eco Tankers CFO has scooped the manager of the month for August, beating 86 other maritime execs, analysts and brokers.
League organiser Vivek Srivastava, an economist at Pacific Basin, said “all-seeing” Sbarounis racked up an “incredible” 256 points in three game weeks, maxing out on point machines Erling Haaland and Mo Salah.
He picked the right weeks to make these two captains as the goals flew in.
Srivastava praised “impressive portfolio construction” by the CFO of a shipping company that only owns two types of vessels, VLCCs and suezmaxes.
“Although I did read some wacky story about Okeanis spending a tortuous 20 days per ship cleaning up half their VLCC fleet to carry diesel back from the East in the slow summer months and reposition them in the West for Q3. They term it the ‘LR4 trade’,” he said.
“So perhaps Ira does aspire to more of a portfolio than a pure-play approach,” Srivastava added.
The economist warned it is notoriously difficult to draw any firm conclusions in the first few weeks of the season.
“Strange things happen in August. I cannot be the only one who is deeply suspicious of Liverpool’s three-out-of-three defensive clean sheets. After all, these are the same four defenders that played such a high line the last few seasons, they belong in a circus, right?” he said.
“Like Ira’s VLCCs, I suspect they will ‘dirty up’ after the international break,” the organiser added.
Sbarounis came just ahead of Hartree’s new dry bulk FFA trader Sindre Garnas and league debutant Nils Thommesen from Fearnley Securities.
“Like any chartering, S&P, or newbuilding desk, we operate in a world of imperfect information. AI will never replace us. Although there are some job functions in our industry that could be replaced by an Excel spreadsheet,” Srivastava concluded.
