Why the Baltic Dry Index Has Had Its Day

by Taras Berezowsky February 3, 2012 Commodities

Source: The Financial Times. Click on the image above to watch the video on the FT page. We recently had the most pleasant (yet soporific) experience watching a detailed rundown on the Baltic Dry Index. James Mackintosh, investment editor for the Financial Times — home of awesome Technicolor ties and bad haircuts, apparently — employs [...]

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Featured Speaker Slate Filling Up For Commodity Edge

by Taras Berezowsky February 3, 2012 Commodities

If you haven’t yet had a chance to peruse the Featured Speakers list for MetalMiner and Spend Matters’ upcoming event, you should take this Friday morning (or afternoon, or evening, depending on your time zone) to do so. We just added a few key speakers this week, all of whom have extensive experience in commodities. [...]

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Back to the Old Days: India to Pay Iran for Oil in Gold

by Lisa Reisman February 2, 2012 Commodities

Media reports suggests that India has agreed to pay the price of crude oil it imports from Iran in gold, which makes it the first country to drop the US dollar for purchasing the Iranian oil. Citing an Israeli intelligence website, The Times of India has reported that India is opting for gold to repay [...]

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Hedge Funds Take a Beating

by Stuart Burns February 2, 2012 Commodities

Have you ever felt bad about that fixed-price metals contract you placed, only to find a month later the price had dropped? Or had trouble explaining to the VP of purchasing why you didn’t place a resting order last month when this month the metals price jumped 10 percent? Don’t worry, predicting metals prices is [...]

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China’s Rare Earths Production Skirts WTO – Lynas Corp. to Fill the Gap?

by Taras Berezowsky February 2, 2012 Commodities

Source: NY Times As an update to our previous post about the WTO ruling on China’s export restrictions, we thought we’d point to a follow-up from Reuters on the ruling’s implications for rare earth metal quotas. In short, there’s a loophole. Reuters notes that “Monday’s ruling left open a loophole for export quotas if they [...]

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WTO Rules Against China’s Raw Materials Exports – How Big a Win for Domestic Steel?

by Taras Berezowsky February 1, 2012 Commodities

We all know a thing or two about news that’s not really news (or, to put it more accurately, news that’s overblown) — and this phenomenon seems to happen in the realm of rare earth metals more than anywhere else. Reporting on rare earth metals is such a hot commodity in and of itself that [...]

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The Not-So-Secret Secret Behind Gold Prices – It’s Mostly About Currency

by Stuart Burns February 1, 2012 Commodities

A lot of headlines are underscoring the strong year-to-date performance of precious metals. Gold is set to have the best January since 2008, while silver is poised for a record January compared to the last thirty years. Even platinum and palladium are up 15.8 percent and 5.7 percent year to date, respectively. Yet in large [...]

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The Most Volatile Metal? Silver Is Prime Suspect No. 1

by Taras Berezowsky February 1, 2012 Commodities

Even though Eastman Kodak has declared bankruptcy, there is just enough industrial demand being mustered in the solar panel, battery and conductor sectors, not to mention investment in ETFs and physical metal, to give the silver price its best start in a new year since 1983. According to a recent article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, silver [...]

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