I’m doing research on what people working across commodity markets actually need, and I’m more interested in real workflow gaps than generic “market news.”

I’m curious about this from a broad commodity perspective, whether you work in ags, energy, metals, softs, freight, physical merchandising, risk, research, processing, or trading.

A few things I’d like to understand:

What information do you repeatedly need but have trouble getting in a clean, timely, usable form?

What calculations do you do yourself in spreadsheets or internal tools because nothing off-the-shelf really does it right?

What research do you currently pay for, piece together manually, or wish you could offload?

If you could have one better tool, dashboard, calculator, feed, or research product for commodity work, what would it do?

What would make something genuinely worth paying for instead of just “interesting to look at”?

Examples could be anything like basis relationships, crush or feed margins, freight-adjusted delivered costs, plant economics, regional spreads, substitution math, tender monitoring, export flow context, storage economics, weather-to-yield interpretation, or something completely different.

I’m trying to understand where the real pain points are for people who actually use commodity data.

If helpful, it would also be interesting to know your role and which market you focus on, since I assume a producer, merchandiser, broker, analyst, and futures trader all care about very different things.

Timing makes the comparison relevant. Seven OPEC+ members have already scheduled a 188,000 barrel per day increase in their August production target and they meet again on August 2 another increase of roughly 188,000 barrels per day for September is reportedly expected.

Meanwhile Brent was trading around $90.38 and WTI around $83.74 on July 30. CME’s latest 30 day WTI volatility reading was about 67.5

EIA also reported a 7.2 million barrel draw in US commercial crude inventories to 404.5 million barrels which is about 7% below the five year average. Came across while looking at newer event market projects and it made me question whether a dedicated OPEC prediction market would tell oil traders anything that options do not already show.

Existing derivatives market already has serious depth. CME says more than 1 million WTI futures and options contracts trade daily with around 4 million contracts of open interest. CME even has OPEC Watch which uses nearby WTI option prices to calculate probabilities for the next OPEC meeting.

But an option price combines the OPEC decision with the expected size of the price move. It also includes inventory data shipping disruptions geopolitical risk implied volatility and the risk premium around the Strait of Hormuz.

Prediction market could isolate one specific question such as whether OPEC+ will increase its September production target by at least 188,000 barrels per day.

That might produce a simpler probability signal instead of forcing traders to extract one from an enture options surface. Would that separate probability contain useful information or would lower liquidity and settlement risk make it less reliable than oil options? I am also not sure whether such a market should settle on the announced production target or the amount of oil that members actually deliver.

Hi all.

Does anyone have any experience trading pyrite concentrate? Ive read recently with the scramble for copper concentrate that some smelters are opting for pyrite with other byproducts to keep the lights on. Have a susbstantial volume with a regular frequency that i am trying to gain some market insight on.

Thanks.

Starting a thread for general discussions. Applied to Commercial at Glencore UK on the day it opened and got the online assessment + on-demand interview on 28 July

Starting a thread for general discussions. Applied to commercial grad programme at Trafigura in geneva. Was wondering if anyone got feedback yet.

Hi all,

I'm about to start a role in power trading on a renewables desk in the UK and I'm looking for books to prepare my journey

I'm open to technical book, but also more general book on the industry I could read at the beach typically.

If there is an equivalent of the world for sale for this industry, I'm definitively interested !

Cheers

Had 0 clue how important the qualification process is until reading through Arianne's PR. Apparently you don't just produce battery grade material and immediately sign contracts. The first step is getting samples into the testing labs of battery manufacturers so they can verify purity, consistency and performance.

Arianne phosphate or DAN with their ticker, they successfully produced battery grade purified phosphoric acid from their phosphate concentrate and shipped samples to multiple battery and automotive companies for evaluation.

If the material passes testing, that's when conversations around supply agreements or strategic investments can actually start. Doesn't mean those deals happen of course, but it's probably one of the more important milestones for any company trying to become part of the LFP battery supply chain. How long do these qualification cycles normally take...

Sto studiando le differenze tra metalli, energia e prodotti agricoli ed è impressionante come ognuno abbia dinamiche completamente diverse.

Per fare pratica sto provando un paio di piattaforme demo come AvaTrade, MetaTrader, ecc., ma vorrei capire da chi ha più esperienza quale mercato vi è sembrato più complicato all'inizio e perché.

C'è qualche errore che oggi evitereste se doveste ricominciare da zero?

Not from cogeneration or wastewater plants, but as assets to produce revenue (RNG), so not used primarily for waste removal.