schminkie

The Burst Commodities Bubble

i'm short mos and look forward to some decent returns, tomorrow most likely. i'm thinking - always dangerous - that tomorrow, 10/10, will be a day of hard selling. who wants to be long going into a weekend?

The Brightest Stars in the Commodities Boom, Part Two

cool stuff esp the facts on chinese weddings. these are the things that one needs to know.

wouldn't it be a better idea to buy miners who dig up cobalt than corps that use it? and don't certain major iron and coal miners come up with it almost as a by product or coincidental product 'find' in the course of work?

i still like met coal. for the time being steel has no broadly used alternative. buy dips. sells spikes. make money. don't be bitter.

per dry bulk. i keep asking appropriate parties why loading, unloading and transporting - land, sea - coal is so stuck in the past technologically. no answers yet. however the price 'warnings' mentioned by m.a. are appropriate. companies bid and are frequently happy to take what they can get as opposed to what the wall st journal says they should get. do you ever pick up the phone and talk to these guys? time is money.

ps. congrats on your grammies, m.a.

Commodities Are Taken to the Woodshed - What's the Game Plan?

last i read the supplies of thermal coal were hitting rock bottom at u.s. electric power plants and the shortage of metallurgical coal for coke/steel production gave producers a strangle hold on the steel industry, sky high prices. demand is well beyond supply to a point that a 'slow down' in china would barely put a dent in the situation. minus export, the demand for fundamental substances for building
infrastructure alone will support the coal industry, iron ore industry, etc. the amelioration of weather related damage in australia and the end of ore negotiations between bhp billiton and chinese steel mills will not lessen but instead will bake in and stabilize the doubled [+/-] prices. the long term power disaster in south africa is awful yet does not deter investment by arcelor mittal et al.

for the short run i suppose dips spurts and corrections are important plays in commodities. but in the long, run even the so-called slow downs and price barriers and macro- economic concerns will bow to the strength of what is essentially an industrial revolution; an economic movement of historic [literally] proportions.

much chatter about lower exports from china. more important is the lower exports of these commodities from the likes of indonesia, vietnam and india. given the choice between selling them at record profits or retaining them [gov't policy, tariffs] to use for their own infrastructures, it seems for now that local investment rules.

personally i like dry bulk shipping, brazilian iron/steel industries and met coal miners. i am fairly giddy at the prospect of taking substantial gains and buying back in way lower.

f.y.i: in my readings [foreign press, trade papers, gov't positions and studies] i find that fear of an american slow down etc. is often lip service and that more than one of these source expresses no fear whatsoever. i think there is schadenfreude at work to wit, many nations are happy to delink from the u.s. and it's tsuris as much as is possible.