Options flow as a superior signal

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