The Energy Traders Who Are Getting Rich from Your Pain

As European households face record energy bills, energy traders are recording their best returns since 2022. Here is how the market is working and why governments aren't stopping it.

The 70 percent surge in TTF natural gas prices between March 1 and March 24, 2026 did not produce uniform winners and losers. For European households and businesses, it produced only losers: higher bills, tighter budgets, cancelled investment decisions, reduced consumption with associated quality-of-life costs. For energy trading desks at investment banks, commodity trading houses, and specialist energy funds, it produced something quite different: the kind of volatility and directional movement in which trading firms make their largest profits.

Energy trading is not inherently wrong. Active trading in commodity markets serves genuine economic functions: it provides liquidity that allows producers and consumers to hedge their risks, and it aggregates dispersed information into price signals that guide investment and consumption decisions. In a normal market, trading profits and customer energy costs are not in direct tension — both can be achieved simultaneously.

In a crisis market, the relationship is more complicated. Trading firms that hold long positions in gas futures — bets that prices will rise — benefit directly from the same price increases that are devastating European household budgets. The fact that they may have provided hedging insurance to those same consumers against this very eventuality, or provided liquidity that benefited European gas importers in some technical sense, does not make the coincidence of their profits with ordinary people's pain politically comfortable.

The trading profits visible in the quarterly results of Vitol, Glencore, Gunvor, Trafigura — the major commodity trading houses that dominate European energy markets — are substantial. These are private companies that do not publish detailed earnings, but industry estimates based on position disclosures suggest that the five largest commodity trading houses collectively made between $4 and $8 billion in additional profits from energy market positions in March 2026.

Politicians across Europe are demanding windfall taxes on these profits. The companies argue, correctly from an economic standpoint, that windfall profits taxes will reduce incentives for the market-making activity that provides liquidity in crisis conditions. Both sides are right. This is what irresolvable political tensions in market economies look like.