About

The Firm

Hong Kong-based. Principal trader of crude, middle distillates, naphtha and LPG.

Matrix Investment Group Limited is a Hong Kong-based physical oil trader. The firm trades full-vessel cargoes of crude, middle distillates, naphtha and LPG as principal, on its own balance sheet. Activity spans West Africa and the Atlantic Basin, the Arabian Gulf, India, China, Singapore, East Africa, Northwest Europe and the Mediterranean.

The business was founded in 2008 to trade between China and the rest of the world — raw materials and goods moved into and out of the mainland. In 2021 the firm narrowed its mandate to oil, reading the recovery in physical demand as the moment to specialise. Matrix is independent and founder-owned. It takes no position it cannot finance, hedge and deliver.

The Founder

Lee Shi

Founder & CEO

Lee Shi is the founder and chief executive of Matrix Investment Group Limited.

His career has been built on cross-border trade between China, the United States and the wider world, alongside board-level advisory work with foreign-invested Chinese enterprises and international corporates through both growth and distressed-recovery mandates.

Outside Matrix, Lee owns Salliot Material Technology and Salliot Lithium, a lithium mining and trading business. Directors' outside interests are disclosed to counterparties at onboarding.

Lee holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Shandong University and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Youngstown State University.

He founded Matrix in 2008 on a single conviction: in physical commodities, the most valuable role a trader can play is that of a reliable counterparty. Someone who delivers, performs, and treats the relationship as worth more than any single cargo. That conviction continues to shape the firm.

The Firm

Baiju Devaraj

Principal & Head of Trading

Baiju Devaraj is a principal of Matrix Investment Group Limited and head of its trading desk. He also founded Devan Holdings, a physical oil trading desk. At Matrix he led the firm's move into oil in 2021, and runs the East-of-Suez book: crude from West Africa and the Gulf into Indian refiners and Chinese independents; middle distillates from the Gulf and India into Singapore and East Africa; naphtha into the crackers of Asia and Northwest Europe; LPG into China. He owns each trade from sourcing to discharge.

Fifteen years across the oil markets, with counterparty relationships spanning Gulf producers, Indian and Chinese refiners, the Singapore middle-distillate complex and the Northwest European clean-products trade. He came to physical from a senior seat on a financial derivatives desk — a foundation that still shapes how he prices the book.

He carries the firm's market and counterparty risk. Every position is sized to limits he sets and cleared against counterparties he has personally underwritten.

Baiju holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Industrial Engineering.

Li Yong Xing

Executive Director

Li Yong Xing is an executive director of Matrix Investment Group Limited.

Li brings more than three decades inside China's energy, mining and minerals sector — across state-linked resource enterprises and cross-border supply into the mainland. As an executive director he gives the board a China-facing perspective on counterparty standing, market access and the resource flows that move the markets Matrix serves.

His remit on the board covers governance, counterparty review and the firm's read on Chinese energy and feedstock demand.

Farhan Mujibudheen

Senior Trader

Farhan Mujibudheen is a senior trader at Matrix Investment Group Limited. He runs the West-of-Suez middle-distillate book — Northwest Europe and the Mediterranean — and the LPG line into Europe, and covers Singapore alongside it. He also runs the firm's paper hedging on ICE and the Singapore swaps market.

A background in investment banking and financial analytics, including a commodities data seat at Bloomberg, shapes how he prices a trade: curve, spread and optionality weighed before a barrel moves. Quantitative by training and physical by conviction, he has built that instinct into the firm — the in-house CTRM, the vessel-tracking layer and the analytical tooling the desk now relies on. Architecture applied to a physical book, run with the discipline of a market that does not forgive.

Farhan holds a Bachelor of Business and a Master of Science in Economics from the University of Glasgow.