Home: Currency and Commodity Trading

🚜 Early Exposure to Commodity Trading

My involvement in commodity markets began early in life. Growing up in Iowa near livestock and grain markets, I frequently visited the major exchanges in Chicago and Omaha. As a teenager, I helped my grandfather hedge egg shipments by selling egg forwards on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and at age fourteen I opened my own trading account to trade soybeans.

After graduating college, I bought and sold a 24-unit apartment building which shifted my focus toward financial assets. This experience reinforced my preference for financial markets over physical ones.

🎓Academia: 

My academic career built a strong foundation in commodity economics. I began teaching mineral and petroleum economics at the Colorado School of Mines and later developed courses at Johns Hopkins University that blended applied economics with hands-on lessons in commodity and currency markets. Through this work, I trained many students who went on to careers in trading.

After publishing work on business cycles I joined the Friedberg Mercantile Group in Toronto as chief economist. While remaining a professor at Johns Hopkins, I edited Friedberg’s market letter Commodity and Currency Comments. I later served as president of Toronto Trust Argentina in the aftermath of the 1994 Mexican peso crisis.

In my broader analysis of commodity markets, I argued that today’s environment characterized by high inflation, low inventories leading to backwardation, the global transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and geopolitical shocks like the war in Ukraine has created a “perfect cocktail” for a bullish commodity market.