Taking the Show to Broadway

Navios’ stars Ted Petrone and Mike McClure did have Monday off but spent the rest of the week presenting their company at the Pareto, FBR, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Capital Link conferences. We can now appreciate why you need a management team with a hundred years of experience. Someone has to be minding the store.
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Bigger, Better… Forever

We don’t know how they do it, but this year’s CMA’s shipping and trade conference and exposition, “Shipping 2009”, was not only the biggest ever but showed the resilience of the industry. The ladies of CMA, who run the conference like a well-oiled machine, tell us attendance exceeded 2,200. If sports arenas are named after corporations, it seems only fair that the Hilton be renamed the CMA during this annual event.

The success of this event is attributable to the fact that it reaches out to the whole industry and covers all of the issues it faces. This year the shipping markets and piracy got equal billing. While, naturally, our main focus is on the shipping markets, Professor Christopher Coker’s presentation on piracy highlighted its significance, permanence and far-reaching risks, if it becomes linked with terrorism. For us, the rude awakening was his statement that unlike the 19th century when piracy was eradicated, today the best we can hope for is to “manage risks.” And, if we are unsuccessful even in that, we will have far more serious issues. The speech is a must read for its realistic but unfortunately bleak perspective of our future.

From the extensive three day program our chairman puts together with the assistance of the CMA, we have selected the following as perhaps being of the greatest interest to our readers.

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Athenian and Viking Confab

In front of a packed crowd at the New York Helmsley, the Hellenic-American and Norwegian-American Chambers of Commerce held their 14th Annual Joint Shipping Conference under the catchy title “Are the Bulls and the Bears Right?”

The day started off with derivatives, a tough topic for early in the morning. Nevertheless, the presenters pulled it off and kept everyone interested. To start off Robert Shaw of Mystras Ventures gave a great overview and primer on freight derivatives. In particular, he emphasized their importance of derivatives for hedging but noted that freight volatility and correlation with other commodities has attracted financial players into the market, a recurrent theme.

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