Read It All

The rest of this site is built to be dipped into, and that is still the main way to use it. This page is the other option: a running order for reading the whole thing front to back, with every stop linked to the next so you never have to come back to an index.

It opens with the handful of essays that explain how commodity markets work at all, so the machinery is familiar before the markets start. Then the ten families, each primer followed by its own markets. Then the themes that cut across them, and the reference tables last.

150 stops, front to back

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How Markets Work

4 stops

Before the markets themselves: how a commodity gets one trusted price, which markets are actually the biggest, who the physical merchants are, and what the positioning data does and does not tell you.

The Families

135 stops

The ten groups in turn. Each opens with a primer on how that family trades, then walks its markets one by one.

Cross-Cutting Themes

10 stops

Essays that cut across the families: productivity, the price of a calorie, stockpiles, green premiums, and the markets that never formed.

Reference

1 stops

Conversion tables and the glossary, for looking things up afterwards.

150Conversions and Glossary