Chapter 9
The Commodity Investor
I met “The Commodity Investor” in his nondescript conference room in a nondescript office building on a nondescript street that could have been anywhere in the world. It was amidst this backdrop that he discussed his very descriptive view of global balance sheets across the commodity complexes.
Depth personified, the Commodity Investor can cite the numbers driving global supply and demand conditions across a dizzying array of commodities, synthesizing this data into coherent medium-term views backed by significant capital. What distinguishes him is not necessarily the depth of analysis, but his willingness to put on risk across the entire commodity supply chain, expressing themes in commodity and equity markets all over the world.
He is a long-term structural commodity bull; as such, his views on the inter-linkages between East and West, the true drivers of supply chains, and the importance of timing trades offer tremendous insights about not only the various commodity complexes he trades, but also other asset classes, politics, policy, and higher-level, fast-moving changes in the world order.
The Commodity Investor combines bottom-up, fundamental analysis with rigorous macro analysis, and he has worked with some of the best in the business for each of these disciplines. His biggest lesson from 2008 was that risk management is everything as it applies to both core portfolio risks, such as hedging the inherently large tail risks in commodity markets, ...
