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.
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 →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 →