Themes
The fact sheets cover one market at a time. These essays cut across them: how commodities compete, what moves between them, and where the trade ideas hide.
Interactive
What Makes a Market →
Every market scored against the eight conditions something has to meet before it can carry a forward contract. Sort by any test to see which markets fail for which reason.
The Biggest Markets
Every commodity market ranked by the dollars that trade through it each day. Crude and gold dwarf everything; orange juice is a rounding error.
Read the theme →The Productivity Race
US crop yields indexed to 1960: why corn and soybeans outran wheat, and what relative productivity does to the acres they fight over.
Read the theme →Food vs Feed vs Fuel
Where each grain and oilseed actually goes, and how a shift in biofuel mandates or feed demand ripples across the complex.
Read the theme →The Cost of a Calorie
The relative price of food energy across the staples, why the world's poor eat rice and wheat, and what substitution looks like when one spikes.
Read the theme →The Foods That Moved
How the Columbian Exchange decided which foods became commodity markets and which never did, why adoption took centuries, and why your national dish is an immigrant: chili is American, sugar cane was not.
Read the theme →Per-Capita Leaders
Which countries consume the most of each commodity per person, and who is most exposed when the price moves.
Read the theme →Almost Commodities
The markets that never quite formed and the ones that traded and died: bandwidth, memory chips, water, box-office receipts, pork bellies, and now AI compute, and the single thread in why.
Read the theme →The Cup and the Crop
Coffee's waves, pods, premium instant, and the Starbucks and Luckin chains: how the money moved downstream to the cup while the bean stayed a commodity priced off a futures contract.
Read the theme →Government Stockpiles
Oil in salt caverns, cheese in caves, the EU butter mountain and wine lake, China's grain and metal reserves, and Quebec's strategic maple syrup: when and why governments hoard commodities, and how it usually ends.
Read the theme →The Green Premium
Green steel, green aluminium, green hydrogen, even "green" coal: which low-carbon commodity premiums are real, how book-and-claim accounting lets the green attribute travel away from the physical tonne, and where greenwashing still lives.
Read the theme →Exchanges and Price Discovery
How a commodity gets one trusted price: from the printed price-current and the telegraph to standardized exchanges, their consolidation, price reporting agencies, the LBMA fix, ISDA paperwork, crypto perps, and the capital controls that have shut whole markets down.
Read the theme →Who Holds the Position
The Commitments of Traders report and its equivalents worldwide: what the categories really mean, why "commercial" was never a clean hedger proxy, why Europe, Japan and the US publish incompatible things on different days, and the exchange that admits in its own rulebook that its report sees only part of the market.
Read the theme →Trading Houses
Why Vitol, Glencore, Trafigura, Gunvor and the Japanese sogo shosha sit where they do, how they really make money, where information edge ends and where regulators have drawn the line, and why hedge funds cannot just copy them.
Read the theme →Seeds and Sprays
Fertilizer, genetics, and herbicides are the tripod under modern yields: the four companies that sell the seed and the chemicals, why farmers can no longer save their seed, why "GMO" is narrower than people think, and the resistance treadmill it all rides on.
Read the theme →The Commodity Is the Logistics
For a whole class of markets the raw material is nearly free and the delivered price is freight, processing and the last mile. Why those markets are constrained by infrastructure rather than by geology, why their futures contracts so often fail to form, and why their chokepoints are built rather than found.
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