Marhelm - my shipping data platform

A few years ago I went into the deep end investing in oil tankers in front of IMO 2020. Initially, I did really well. I ended 2019 up nearly 90%. Then came covid, the lockdowns, the first drawdown, contango, the rocket ship back up, and the post contango hangover. I was over levered and solely invested in tankers. I rode life changing gains all the way back down. I did some things right, but a lot of things wrong. In the aftermath, I decided to start building out my own intelligence around the companies I had obsessed over for the past year.

I put up a sales page and promised a lifetime subscription at a flat price of $175/year to anyone who wanted to support the early version, which focused on just a few tanker companies, their fleets, some of the deals they were making, and their current NAVs. To my surprise, quite a few people took me up on that offer. By the time I went live, I had a few hundred subscribers.

Fast forward to today, I’m on my second version. After doing a container ship site, and having subscribers asking for LNG and dry bulk coverage, I realized that if I was going to end up covering the whole shipping industry, I’d need to converge to a single platform and brand. I joined the Spanish word for “sea” and the English word for a ship’s steering wheel and came up with Marhelm. I also liked the distinctively Nordic ring, which fits in well with the heavily Scandinavian shipping culture (stemming all the way back to Viking days, I suppose).

Though not all elements from the database are currently in the interface, the new version, which launched in November 2021 and gets data updates daily and feature updates/bug fixes weekly, combines dozens of shipping specific data sources, from websites, to corporate filings, market data, and private sources - into a single interface for exploring and analyzing the world of investing in shipping.

Beyond exploring companies in a standardized format, Marhlelm also allows for looking at high frequency market data - we have new tanker and dry bulk fixtures uploaded daily.

Marhelm also offers a discussion forum which is frequented by industry professionals who work in shipping companies and commodity trading groups, as well as hundreds of retail and professional investors who specialize or are very interested in shipping.

Every week, we do a “roundup” of everything that happened in shipping that week, which includes major news items and trading summaries. I also include my own personal trading moves on the last slide of each weekly roundup. We also cover special interest items such as (recently) the food oils shortage, the war in Ukraine and its impacts on shipping, and previously, covid. For example, we correctly predicted in the very early days that Omicron would herald the end of the global pandemic as we knew it based on deep analysis of hospital data from South Africa and the UK. We used the dip to get large exposure to energy related names which sold aggressively.

If you write me, I’m happy to provide you a sample of recent weekly roundups. We also do a year end reviews where we examine everything that happened during the year, and offer predictions for the year.

Marhelm doesn’t offer investment advice, but we do give you the information - and the community sounding board - to do deep analysis in shipping and commodities that can help you make better decisions. I’d like to share a few pieces of unsolicited feedback from our customers:

If my ROI was as good on my own ideas as it is on the subscription to this site I would quit my job

Marhelm is where it’s at for deep discussions on everything tankers. A lot of great minds are on Marhelm.

The weekly roundups and presentations are great. Thanks for running such a great service!

Personally, I get a ton of value from the posts in this channel and the weekly roundup slides. The last 2 years have been my most successful in terms of investing ever and this service has played a large role in that.

I really enjoy everything. Every morning I sit out on the patio watching the dogs run around and read the discord. The same with the weekly chat. Definitely appreciate the effort you put into this It really is top notch.

Started investing in April 2020. Got overly excited about the tanker trade and put most of my capital into it. By fall of 2020 I was down 35% while all my friends were up 50-100% chasing tech. Almost threw in the towel but joined the platform and discord and up 500% now. Only started with $50k so it’s not a ton of money but still life changing for our family. The tanker trade almost broke me but instead was the greatest lesson I could have ever learned. I let my thesis change and got emotionally attached to the trade. With the help of the platform and the members of this chat I use data to inform my decisions. Can’t thank you enough for what you have created in Tankerdata/Marhelm

loving the work on the website so far and especially the discord. I spent a lot of time early on as a tanker analyst, doing bottoms up analysis on trade and fixture data. so i appreciate all the work required going through it all looking forward to seeing how Marhelm turns out

I do get better ideas here than in KEDM. Gonna let my subscription expire there.

Marhelm (specifically our previous version, TankerData) was also recently specifically mentioned on the earnings call by the CEO of a multi billion dollar shipping company, and I have personally been featured in a Bloomberg article for my unconventional approach to shipping investing (I’m the guy who heard the Suez canal was blocked, pulled over his car, and YOLO’d shipping stocks 2 minutes before market close).

I believe in what I’m doing and am sticking with it. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished so far, though I also see the short falls, feel overwhelmed at time, and am consistently behind on the goals that I set. The platform is crap on mobile (though the chat works fine), and it’s truly hard to stay on top of all of the changes and feature requests.

If you’re interested in learning more, reach out to me. I’m happy to provide additional screenshots, weekly roundup samples, and schedule demos. The service began at $175/yr and two years in, I still honor those grandfathered prices, after four price increases. The current price is $999/yr. I hear there are also some coupon codes floating around on Twitter that you can use for a discount.

Thanks for reading =)