Materials Risk

Word bubble: The kinks of financial journalism

A decade on from the 2008 financial crisis and amidst the current crisis of confidence affecting many emerging markets its worth revisiting how markets of all sorts (not just commodity markets) are represented in the financial media. Recent…

Just how accurate are oil price predictions?

“Economists don’t forecast because they know, they forecast because they’re asked.”

K. Galbraith, economist

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) polls institutions every month on a range of economic variables…

Everyday stable prices: How one entrepreneur is helping farmers plan for the future

“We’ve seen a halving in the number of UK dairy farms in the past ten years. This is a real problem.”

Pigs might fly: A look at the market for lean hogs

Sometimes its worth looking at markets off the beaten track of most commodity analysts, ones not beholden to movements in the US dollar or other broad macro economic movements. This week I’m looking at the market for lean hogs in the US, a…

What I learned from writing and publishing two books

The short answer is a lot…but that isnt very interesting, nor very helpful. To say the best way to learn about a subject is to write a book about it is undoubtedly true. It forces you to really think about an idea and then ground it down…

Drowning in oil? In defence of The Economist’s oil price articles

“Many of the great economic forecasting errors of the past half century came from excessive extrapolation of performance of the recent past and treating a country’s growth rate as a permanent characteristic rather…

Publication day!

For those of us who aren’t J.K. Rowling, publication day is a bit of a soft concept. None of this opening bookstores at midnight. I thought about releasing it when the markets close, but that was just impossible to engineer and maybe a bit pointless!

How monetary policy and commodity markets collide

Its been widely acclaimed as being a product of the unique combination of geological, technological and commercial factors that are present in the US. One that has evolved into making US shale producers the short-cycle supplier of the energy…