John Polasek

Founder and Manager

 

 

 

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Mr. Polasek has nearly 25 years of experience in the commodity hedging, investment and financing arena.  He is widely known in the volumetric risk and weather derivative industry due to his long time involvement in the industry since 1999.  He has worked as an originator of structured commodity products and financing solutions at Bank of America, Koch Industries, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, JP Morgan, and Deutsche Bank and held various titles during his professional career including Managing Director.  Mr. Polasek has traveled the world in search of commodity driven risk transfers and climate based investments; and has a wealth of deal experience across a wide array of industries around the globe.  He has led the origination groups of several of these institutions for climate related risk and in most instances been the primary person responsible for syndicating the risk to others in the market.  He also has executed some of the most innovative and large weather transactions in the market place – most of which advanced the market place in terms of uniqueness of structure and expanded the range of possible risk transfers.  Mr. Polasek has also assisted in the growth of additional commodity based business lines at some of the largest investment banks in the country through the structuring and origination of transactions as exotic as power variance and correlation swaps; serving institutional investors with the ability to custom build and execute their own commodity indices; executing long term power hedges for renewable clients and full requirement natural gas and power deals for utilities; investing in oil and gas exploration and production and power plant projects; building out midstream logistics businesses that involve oil, fuel oil, propane, and natural gas movements around the globe; hedging the price and volume risk of agricultural entities including reinsurance; and building out a portfolio of cross commodity trading concepts which couple weather risk and other tradable securities.  He has successfully executed hundreds of transactions in his career and been very involved in the financings of several projects and commodity based corporations.   He has a deep and broad understanding of several commodity based business models around the world.  One of Mr. Polasek’s latest forays into gaining in depth knowledge of his potential clients’ risk profiles involves the water industry in the United States.  From his efforts in this arena, he has authored a white paper for the water industry accessible at the following link:

 

http://www.financingsustainablewater.org/resource-search/sustainable-utilities-financial-instruments-manage-weather-related-risk.

 

Credentials and Miscellaneous

 

Mr. Polasek has served on the Board of Directors of the Weather Risk Management Association.  He holds an MBA in Finance and Marketing from the University of Texas.  He has also studied at Cambridge University.  He holds a BA in Managerial Studies, Economics and Political Science from Rice University.   

 

Mr. Polasek played professional baseball for the Baltimore Orioles and Montreal Expos.  His time away from the office is spent with his family, participating in charitable causes, golfing, snow skiing, hunting and fishing.