← The HC Commodities Podcast
The HC Commodities Podcast
Live Event: Navigating Uncertainty - Trends and Risks in Commodity Trade
00:40:00
If uncertainty is the new normal – how can the commodities markets and participants adapt? What does that mean for costs, supply chains and people. In May we held our latest Live Event in London, in partnership with ITFA. The event was hosted by Aon, with additional sponsorship by Atradius, Brown Brothers Harriman, Coface, Natixis Partners, Pole Star Global, The Mercury Group and RESCOM. Our panellists debated themes including the sources of uncertainty, and what it means for markets, prices and participants. What are the impacts of tariffs and geopolitical tensions? What is the state of the talent landscape as a new generation of professionals, and new businesses, confront these challenges? Is a new generation of deep specialists ready? Joining podcast host, Paul Chapman was Stuart Lawson, Global Head at Aon Credit Solutions; Khushroo Pochkhanawalla, Commodity Risk Director at The Heineken Company; Matthew Chamberlain, CEO at the London Metal Exchange; Marieke Franssen, Managing ...
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to the HC Commodities Podcast, a podcast dedicated to the commodities sector and the people within it. I'm your host, Paul Chapman. This podcast is produced by HC Group, a global search firm dedicated to the commodities sector. So welcome to this HC Commodities live podcast event. We are indeed talking volatility trends, risk uncertainty in the commodity trading sector. Better. I recognize some of you are standing, so we'll try and keep it to sort of 40 minutes, and then we'll turn the mics off, have a quick Q A session, and then we can all rush back over to the bar. So my name is Paul Chapman. I host the HC Commodities Podcast. I'm also managing partner of HC Group, a search firm dedicated to the energy and commodities sector. With us, we have, to my right, Will Tully, head of Business Development for Brown Brothers Harriman. Stuart Lawson, global head of Credit Solutions at Aon. And thank you again for hosting. Matthew Chamberlain, CEO, the London Metals Exchange. And then Marieke Fransen, managing director, head of Commodity Financing at Natixis. And finally, Akush Potch Kanawala, Commodity Risk Director. Got it at Heineken. Very good, huh? So we're talking. I mean, I want to set the scene first in why not just volatile times, but actually, I think the key word at the moment is uncertainty and the impacts that's having across the sector. And ultimately we discuss what the impacts of that are, whether that's fleeting or sustained, and then what the future might hold. Will, maybe you can, just before we get into the sources of uncertainty, just kind of set the scene about how the last month has been for the commodity trading world, and we'll get people to step in.
- [01:51]
B
Sure, sure. Thanks, Paul, for having me back on the podcast. You're absolutely right. There's a lot of uncertainty in the markets right now. I think a lot of it is in part driven by the trade wars. And, you know, tariffs make it very difficult for businesses to plan for the future. So, you know, if you listen to the most recent quarterly earnings calls From American businesses, 87% of those calls included the word uncertainty at some point, which is dramatic. It was only 30 to 38% in the prior quarter. So business leaders are really focused on this right now. And as I said, a lot of it has to do with the tariffs. And it's not just the headline of will there be tariffs or won't there be tariffs? It's also some of the complexities of how do you even calculate what they are. There was the baseline tariffs, then there's the reciprocal tariffs, there's the original section 232 tariffs, people that are business owners have a hard time figuring out which apply to them and which don't. And so I think that's leading to people putting a pause in some cases on their business activity, particularly traders, commodities merchants, who their whole business is moving goods around the world.
- [03:18]
A
Yeah, I think it's sort of the stasis and abeyance, at least right now. Kush obviously is a, you know, sitting there for Heineken and lots of commodities to buy at scale. There was some sense of warning, there was an anticipation that this was going to happen. And the kind of, the sense is, at least from our discussions earlier, right. That actually it was managed quite well. And in the anticipation of this, can you give us some sense of how it was managed and whether that's actually sustainable?
- [03:45]
C
I guess, yeah, I think so. From a pure Heineken point of view, like everybody else, we saw this coming quite early. And so what we can do as a manufacturer of beer, we ship a lot from the Netherlands into the us we could pre stock the US Market. Right. So we produce more, we bottle it quicker and we get it across the water quicker. So that was our, our primary kind of response to this. Now, secondary to that, what we can do is we can make use of our assets in other areas of the world. Right. So as a global brewer, we don't have to just ship from the Netherlands to the us if the UK strike up a trade deal with the us, then, you know, we can brew in the UK and then ship it from the UK to the us. So there are different things that we can do. But you know, long term, what I guess the Trump administration wants is for us to increase our brewing capacity in the U.S. but that's, it's a lot easier said than done, Will, you know, talking about people putting on, putting investments on hold and so forth. And it's not a switch that you can just flick, you know, if you want to increase your brewing capacity in the us. So we own Lagunitas there, but it's a relatively small operation. If we want to suddenly make that big, you have to get the right bottles in. You know, it might sound a bit crazy, but, you know, the bottles that you're, you're drinking the beer out of today, you have a one way bottle, you have a returnable bottle, you have to get the right pack mixer in place as well. So longer term is a lot of uncertainty out there. And I'll just go back to what Will said, it, it stops you from making investments and really Makes you think about, you know, what you're going to.
- [05:32]
A
Do, especially when there's concerns about matching the timelines to those investments to actually make the changes needed. Matthew, how is the LME that was born in the period of tariffs and so forth? What have you seen at the lme? Have you seen the market respond and adapt at least over April into May?
- [05:51]
D
Yeah. So I think what's fascinating for us is that this is having clearly fundamental impacts on prices, but it's also having technical impacts on prices. So if I take copper as an example. Right. Clearly there are views being expressed macroeconomically about what a higher tariff environment is going to do and that is obviously going to have an impact on the copper price. Dr. Copper, the economic bellwether, and that's really the core function of our exchange and other exchanges is to reflect that and allow that to be priced and to be hedged. And that's a natural approach. What we found really interesting, and where I think the whole industry has really had to move to keep up, is that in some ways the globalization of copper, the fungibility, the broad fungibility of copper between the LME and COMEX and Shanghai Futures Exchange was in many ways indicative of that period of globalization that we saw kind of perhaps for the last two, three decades, particularly as China opened up and the commodity super cycle that, that drove what we've seen. Interesting. You mentioned uncertainty because of course there aren't actually US tariffs on copper at the moment because it's a subject of a 232 investig. So what you have is perhaps even more pernicious, which is uncertainty around tariffs. So we think most people think that there will be tariffs, I don't know. But exactly to that point you then get this huge pre positioning of copper into the US and that challenges a lot of the established orthodoxies in the market around how those exchanges are going to correlate. Because if you have a duty paid US contract that suddenly starts to spike up. Indeed, that arbitrage between a duty paid US contract and a duty unpaid global becomes effectively a way of expressing a view, the market's view on where those tariffs are going to end up. So if there's a 10% arbitrage, that implies as a weighted average expectation there's going to be a 10% U.S. copper tariff. And then that becomes in some ways a way of expressing, as expressing a view on that. And then you obviously get these flows right. You get flows of metal coming out of warehouses in Asia, going to the U.S. can they get in before the tariffs Come in, can they not? And that starts to move global trade flows in a technical rather than a fundamental way. And so I think it's been this double challenge. You've got the fundamental commodity price moves, which is what we're all here to deal with. Right. That's our business. But it's then actually the technical overlay of how you hedge that that challenges some of those established mechanisms. I think the market's done a good job in hustling and understanding that, but it's really caused a lot of analytical work.
- [08:29]
A
Yeah. And. And the good job is because it still essentially remains a free market. And a lot of the talk about tariffs to me is that we're talking sort of one directional what the US is going to do to the rest of the world. And it's when the rest of the world responds, particularly China and you start getting export controls that things suddenly start getting very weird and out of b. And I guess we're just talking. We're essentially talking political risk. So I tend to, I guess the insurer and the banker, you know, how do you price in political risk when actually all of these things on various pauses and. But you can have a significant order of magnitude in terms of risk on those response base. Yeah.
- [09:06]
E
I mean, just a maybe general comment. We've talked about uncertainty, we've talked about volatility, but I think there's now a kind of a level of unpredictability now as well. So you've got those layers kind of together makes it quite a difficult and challenging environment. I think Ollie opened up about the ability to make business decisions in a complex world becomes even more difficult especially. And I always think when you talk about commodity trade, you're talking about a lot of these, let's say, kind of macro themes you kind of amplified for this area because you're at the forefront of trade around the world. Maybe just a little bit of a story in 2019 we produced today on a bit of thought leadership with the FT called driving growth in uncertain times. That was 2019 and now we sit here in 2025. And I think the phrase that was coined by economists was the kind of a poly crisis. You had all these different interconnected macro themes that were affecting how you trade. And I think that now it's kind of a perma crisis that we were actually seeing a permanent state of complexity and unpredictability in the market. And without name dropping, I was with Sir Alex Younger, who was the former, which I've just name dropped. So last week an event and someone Asked, he's the former head of the MI6 and someone asked the question, so it's when are we going to go back to a level of kind of normality? And he said, this is normality. So we're going to have to get used to trading in a very complex and unpredictable trading environment. To answer your question, I think the credit markets have to adapt and also be aware. I think it's quite a bifurcated marketplace. So those insurers that have always supported this industry group, I think are now looking at it slightly with a level of greater level of due diligence. And those that didn't support it, I think there's a fear factor still. So we need to make sure we bring more that capacity on board.
- [10:58]
A
Yeah, Ricky?
- [11:00]
F
Yeah, I mean, it certainly is an interesting time. And I mean, I think what Matt said was spot on, right. I mean, being a bank, I think you have the pleasure of looking at all players in the supply chain. So there's always something happening somewhere. And you know, on the one side, indeed, you see what Kush was saying, for a lot of producers or companies like Heineken to make long term investments, you don't have the market to do that. You know, there's too much economic uncertainty and to make those investments at this point in time doesn't make a lot of sense. Yet at the same time, it's also a market with a lot of volatility that provides opportunity for some of the trading houses where, you know, they see the market going in a certain direction and they'll take a position, you know, that can go, obviously can go left or right. What I thought was quite interesting in sort of the recent period is that it's not just tariffs actually being implement implemented, but it's almost the anticipation of tariffs potentially coming. I mean, what you see in copper, we've seen it before happening in gold. I mean, at a certain point there was an inventory of five years of demand sitting in the US waiting for something to happen. I mean, we've all seen the gold prices obviously going through the roof with, you know, the uncertainty that we're seeing there, which, you know, for if you're a producer in the gold market, you know, it's a great time for you. It's a time to obviously benefit from such a time and do something there. But it is a very uncertain time. And so, yes, there are short term opportunities and depending on what direction the market is going, whether you're a producer or consumer or trader, there is a momentum to do something. But the Long term planning is becoming much harder and that is something in these markets. I mean, geopolitical tensions aside, I mean, you know, I know it's not Trump's favorite topic, but you know, weather related events can also have a huge impact and we haven't even spoken about that yet here. So it's, it's a lot of different topics. I mean, volatility by itself I don't think is anything necessarily new for the market, but the speed of the cycle I think is something that over the last few years has been much shorter term cycles and much more volatile than what we've been used to. So it requires, requires a different way of managing.
- [13:14]
A
Yeah. And this allies to that point of you've got twin forces of technology, so the, the speed at which algorithmic systems, whatever it might be, can, can take advantage of news allied to, you know, what's been called rule by tweet, you know, where, where and you know, with the significant capacity to move markets, depending on what tweet comes out that morning or what statement comes out from, you know, Department of Commerce, the U.S. but also increasingly so the reaction responses around the world, those two twin forces do at least amplify that volatility and both in frequency and magnitude as well. Will is the resident. Fellow Americans, would you like to comment on the rule by tweets?
- [14:01]
B
Sure. I mean, you know, I think it depends on what role you play in the market and how that rule by tweet impacts you. For some people that creates opportunity and there's price dislocations in one part of the world versus another and that's fantastic for you. Other people say, I'm not interested in taking on that risk. It's too fast moving, the numbers are too large. I'm just going to sit on my hands and, and not really, you know, make much of a, much of a move right now. And I think you can, you can see that play out with like, you know, the Port of Los Angeles in early May announced that the volume of vessels coming through the port was down 35%. So clearly a lot of market participants were saying, you know, what the volatility and the speed with which things are changing. I think I'm just going to sit here and wait.
- [14:55]
A
But I guess with it, the fund, the actual sort of industry. Right. I imagine that can be a real challenge managing. I guess this, you know, the colleague running in with sort of hair on fire and, you know, what have you done about this?
- [15:07]
C
Yeah, I was just about to say, I mean it's, it can Be quite difficult. When you get the chat from your, your CFO pop up on Microsoft Teams going, you know, have you read this tweet? And be like, well no, I haven't read this tweet. And then you look at the screen and you see the market's gone crazy. So yeah, it's, it's extremely diffic to manage this. And what's, you know, from, from our point of view as the end user, we're permanently short. Right. So if you get a tweet which you know, sets the market off one day, you can, okay, right to Will's point. Yeah, you can just sit on your hands and do nothing. Then on the second and the third and the fourth day, it starts becoming quite painful. And going back to what you're talking about, the amplitude of these moves being here faster, greater, it comes extremely difficult to manage. So you're kind of stuck between sitting on your hands or go into the market. But then with this volatility, of course you know what will happen. You'll buy something or you hedge something and then the next day the prices will all come collapsing down. So I guess for us, what we've and most corporates have is a clear policy to say, okay, this is the minimum you can hedge, this is the maximum by a certain time. And in times of this uncertainty, having a policy is literally your best friend because you know where you can play where you shouldn't be playing. And as long as you stick within those bounds, then no matter what the tweet that comes out and how big the market move is, if you know you're in your policy, then it makes a lot easier conversation with your CFO in the end.
- [16:46]
E
Maybe just a comment, I think some great points that were made there. But what we find certainly you think about credit in credit insurance itself, it's there to facilitate trade. And I certainly think what we've seen is certain insurance companies, when they have kind of what they call multi line, you see this kind of rule by tweet. So messages get passed down to the credit teams. They go, are you taking notice? Are you changing your underwriting strategy? Now this is coming from people who don't probably understand the trade credit dynamics. And I think that's the fear is that you could see these decisions being made at a very high level within insurance companies saying and again it'd be interesting though from a banking perspective, are you seeing that decision and how does that filter down to make decisions where actually the trade credit underwriters, they're quite comfortable with the Trade and understand the risks they're taking.
- [17:31]
F
The energy and resources sector is experiencing unprecedented change. To help navigate this change and capture its opportunities, HC Group launched Enco Insights, a global advisory network dedicated to the sector providing senior advisors and subject matter experts to investment and infrastructure funds, law firms and corporates. Enco Insights leverages HC Group's 20 years of connections in energy and commodities to give clients the expertise they need when the stakes are high and insight matters. Learn more@encoinsight.com what you're saying is same is true for a bank, right? I mean, when the tariffs were just announced and the markets goes volatile, people at senior management who are not in the day to day business start asking questions because everyone sees those markets moving without I think understanding the finesses. But at the same time, I think a lot of the, and I mean, you know, in commodities we tend to deal a lot with, with you know, corporate clients that have policies, as Kush are saying. So it's not that there's all of a sudden like a panic move where everyone starts coming in and doing a lot of things. I think it's, it's also an opportunity in a way to sort of reconnect to clients and sort of find out, you know, okay, so how are you handling it? Is there an opportunity? Because as I said, volatility is for some, challenging for others an opportunity. And I mean, it's also brought a whole new host of other types of companies entering the physical commodity markets. I mean, we've seen funds being active on the paper market for many, many years and now we see a big push towards these kind of companies also coming much more into physical market because all of a sudden there's investment opportunities as well with these price moves that people see. So in a way you're not like obviously different type of role, but banks also have their own limits, their own policies and systems that allow us to monitor the changes that are there. I think it's, if anything maybe proves also, I mean if you look at April, which was very volatile and gone through the roof, it's also normalized back again. And if you've been in commodities long enough and you've seen the cycles, you know that that tends to happen as well. And so people don't immediately panic, which.
- [19:50]
A
Is that expertise bit.
- [19:52]
D
Yeah, just to pick up on the normalization point because I think it's a really important one. And what we see is it actually operates over multiple different timescales. So you obviously get normalization over many years through a super cycle. You get it over the month, as you say, we also actually see it intraday, so it's fascinating. So we open the market at 1am and often there'll have been a tweet or social media or an announcement in the US evening when our market has been closed and you'll see the market open at 1am with quite a significant reaction. Actually by the time that European liquidity comes in, there's perhaps a little bit more analysis behind what this means and the decision making moves from machines to perhaps more junior analysts to more senior analysts. And then by the time we do our physical market pricing at lunchtime in London, you actually often see that reversion. Clearly not full reversion, but I think it's quite helpful. And again, the more I spend time in this job, the more I have a lot of respect for the people who set up the LME 148 years ago because I think they knew all this and everything has been set up to sort of provide that experience, particularly for the physical market. So by the time you do your physical market official pricing at lunchtime, there has at least been that ability to have some degree of logic, some degree to your point of reversion, normalization and then over a longer time period that becomes even more pronounced.
- [21:12]
A
The broader policy piece we've seen swings around the energy transition, sustainability, big statements that have somewhat been rolled back. So there's also a broader political volatility out there as we see sort of big shifts in government, et cetera. So I think we all know it is a very uncertain world that induces volatility. I guess moving on to sort of what are some of the consequences of that today and perhaps over time. We've already mentioned one which is obviously volatility drives results in the commodity trading landscape, drives the need for more services, etc. Which has attracted new entrants and we see that both all the way across the value chain search firms, but banks, trading houses, also energy traders, getting into into metals has been a big story relevant to this community here. So Matthew, can we stay with you because obviously I think your ground zero for seeing some of these new entrants into metals trading, I guess. Can you give us some sense of why you think that is? Is it actually positioning for an energy transition? Is it more about the opportunity and then like to sort of broaden that out to where other people see new entrants coming and what the impact of that is?
- [22:20]
D
Yeah, so I think it is absolutely a combination of the above. We certainly, I think ever since the pandemic and when perhaps the real focus began a rise on ESG and energy transition, electrification. We have seen the metals complex clearly benefit from that and we've seen allocation from perhaps the more specialist funds and then from a more mainstream set of funds. And although there obviously may be a bit of retrenchment and that in the current social environment, we haven't seen anything like a retrenchment back to where we started. So there's a lot of interest and whether that's in the more bulk commodities, aluminium for lightweighting or copper for energy transition or nickel for batteries, or in the, the newer commodities, lithiums, the cobalts, et cetera. So that's definitely a factor. But then we shouldn't underestimate to your point the extent to which perhaps supernormal profits in the energy business at the beginning of the, particularly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine have been recycled into other asset classes. And as you say, metals has definitely been a beneficiary of that. And again, everything works on a cycle. You know, we see traders who perhaps have left the market, you know, five years ago now coming back into, into different shops and then we recognize behaviors that we saw five years ago, et cetera. So there is that, there is that that sense of people coming back in or some names who are on the sidelines. And you know, it's always difficult. Right. Because clearly our business does, is primarily compensated on volumes. So there is a natural benefit to an exchange of these volatile times, fully acknowledging that it has difficulties and challenges for a lot of people in the supply chain. But from our perspective, we clearly welcome that capital coming back into the space. We look at our volumes currently, last year was our third best year on record. We're seeing those volumes come through, seeing the open interest comes through. And certainly for metals trading, it's got to be a good thing, we believe.
- [24:23]
A
Yeah. And before we talk about expertise and then I want to move on to what this all means for costs and so forth. I mean, as Brown Brothers Harriman, a lot of financing of small, small to medium sized companies that have started up or building out into, you know, actually in some cases bulk commodity traders getting into energy. What are you, what are you seeing? Is it is, are we. Because in some ways my perspective is that we haven't actually seen that a real new swell of entrance. I think we've seen hedge funds, I think we've seen trading houses get into new products. But normally by this stage of a cycle you would have, I would have expected, compared to the last one we saw in the 2007, lots of new entrants come in, and I'm sort of wondering, there are now bigger headwinds in terms of compliance. Interest rates have gone up. It's not necessarily an easy time to be setting up a commodity trading platform just in general the last four years.
- [25:14]
B
No, it's not. And I agree with Marieke that when I think of new entrants in the commodity trading space, I think of the financial traders getting into more of the physical side. Because you're right, there's a lot of challenges with setting up a new shop, and a lot of it has to do with the banks. A lot of the commodity trade finance banks want to work with well established, highly capitalized commodity trading companies that have sort of an institutional feel to them. If you're an individual trader that wants to go out on your own and fundraise from friends and family and employ your daughter or your son as the cfo, it's very challenging to find a bank to do that. And so I think that's a big headwind right now for people. That's one of the main reasons I'm not seeing a lot of new entrants.
- [26:06]
F
I think you also have to bear in mind that without giving away my age, but if you go back 15 years ago, a lot of the institutionalized trading houses themselves were small traders. So I think you've also seen a level of sophistication with some of these trade houses in the capital and liquidity. And I mean, the markets today, if anything, what you need, and maybe just post the Ukraine war was a great example. If you looked at the liquidity required to fund margin calls, and when you're a small trader, it's hard to do that. And I mean in commodities and you know, we've all been through a few cycles as well and a few fraud cases, it's mostly smaller family companies and trade houses. So banks have absolutely walked away from that. But it's not just that. It's also, for me, the level of sophistication that you see with the clients. I mean, from being really a trader, they're now much more corporate. And also a lot of like, they've also gone down the supply chain and are no longer just trading, but they're owning. They have a big asset portfolio and lending. And I mean, there are competitors in some of the structures. We're not just facing other banks, we're facing trade houses who then have other banks to go to who will lend their balance sheet for the structuring capacity. And a Risk appetite that banks no longer have and maybe trade houses has. So it's a very different environment in which you have to operate nowadays.
- [27:39]
E
Maybe. Just to add to that comment, I think we talked about the kind of credit market, how it facilitates trade. I think there is this thing that when I spoke to a number of the kind of markets they kind of talk about, the emphasis is as much on the kind of insured as it is the counterparty risk. So what does that mean when you see heightened levels of risk? They gravitate towards the companies that they know, they understand and I guess a flight to experience. So it makes it even more difficult for new entrants to come in and kind of raise that risk capital from.
- [28:05]
A
The insurance market and a limited pool of experience. Right. Essentially, if you look at the commodity talent landscape, no one was investing in new talent post the global financial crisis. So there was no. The new slot of managing directors were made, if you'd like, that would be in place now. At the same time, automation has meant that lots of those operations roles, risk roles that used to be the feeding ground, the next generation, have been automated and that pool's not there either. Kush. I imagine as sort of the prettiest person at the party when it comes to, you know, new, new entrants wanting to come to institutional business with good credit.
- [28:39]
C
Yeah. I mean, you can always tell when, when, when there's a raft of new entrants coming in because your, your inbox is suddenly full of people telling you that they can do things better than your current relationship banks and they can lend to you at X, Y and Z. I guess for us, as, as hecker, we have our relationship banks, we value them and we value the longevity of people who are in commodities and stay in commodities because there is, honestly, there's nothing worse, and it has happened once or twice, is that somebody comes up out of the blue, new entrant into the market promising you everything. You go through a process, you do the isda, you convince a lot of people internally why we should be using a bank, sorry, a counterpart that isn't a lending bank. You do one or two trades and they're gone. Right. It's not the way we work. You know, we brew beer. We've been brewing beer for 150 years, and we're going to brew beer hopefully for another 150 years at least. And we want solid, reliable counterparts to trade with. So from my point of view, if anyone's out there thinking, oh, I could send him a message, please don't you know, we, we really value our relationship banks.
- [29:59]
A
Yeah. And we're going to return. We've sort of got 5, 10 minutes left on where we are in a cycle and if this time it's different. And I think that's an interesting question to get everyone's point of view on. I guess if you step back the kind of this whole idea that actually maybe the last 20 years were kind of the anomaly and everything was quite nice. Global trade, pretty predictable relationships and actually the 1970s and prior to that are probably more indicative of what our future might hold in terms of the volatility. But really the sources of uncertainty, raising geopolitical risk, we've got raising environmental risk, increasing hazards out there and so forth. And you do have a fracturing of global trade that makes less efficient markets. Does that all mean that when it comes to every piece of that process to get a commodity trade done, people are now being factoring higher risks and ultimately we're just going to have a. Inflation. The whole, you know, costs are essentially going to go up. You know, where does that, I mean where does that sit in the scenario is, is this just going to be a more cost, costly business to transact because of that uncertainty, you know, whether or not will maybe help me out.
- [31:11]
B
Gosh, very hard to tell. I, you know, I think the next month or two is going to be really important when you look at how long it takes for products to get from where they're manufactured in one part of the world to where they're consumed, you know, we're getting up to that point where, you know, by June time frame, maybe July, you'll start to see the impact of these tariffs. And I think that will determine whether there's going to be shortages of certain products like what you saw during COVID whether that will lead to inflation and you know, I think the next, like I said, Next 60 days or so, it's going to be really important to tell.
- [31:50]
C
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- [32:22]
A
Matthew sand in the gears so I'm.
- [32:26]
D
Naturally fairly optimistic because look, I think again looking at Base metals. The business of getting a base metals trade done has always been a complex one. Right. You generally have your global reference price, which is the LME price, but that only gets you the metal somewhere in the world in one of our warehouses. Then you've always had the challenge of turning that into a regional price. Right. And it's great pra, regional price premiums, et cetera. And then you've had the challenge of that last mile of getting that to the works where it's needed. And that's always been the business of merchanting. So it's always been this complex stacking of these various services which have kept base metals going. Right. And I don't think that the current environment necessarily breaks that model. It probably just means everyone has to work a little bit harder. So we have to work a little bit harder as the LME to ensure that what we're offering, that global baseline standard is indeed the global baseline standard. So the kind of things we've had to do is introduce responsible sourcing because we're now in a world where if people are taking medal on the LME that could be tainted by child labor or conflict finance, it's just unusable. So we've had to run a little bit harder to get that baseline standard the same. I think the PRAs have done a great job in responding to the challenges of regional pricing, including incorporating tariffs, et cetera. And then the merchants continue doing what they do very well, which is servicing customers. So we all had to work harder. But the fundamental structure of how the base metals market works I feel pretty comfortable with.
- [34:08]
A
Yeah, okay, so, so final question, and I think this is one that's quite sort of prevalent in the zeitgeist at the moment out that when we were 2014, 2015, we'd had a long period of high volatility in commodities, great returns, the rise of the, the big trading houses, you know, and really almost if now looks like overnight we went to a period of let's, let's define it as lower prices in commodities and lower volatility. Now, looking back with a long view, we're sort of saying, well, China stopped buying and things went on to exchanges and the global, all this, this stuff. And now we're 10 years on, we've just had five years of high volatility, higher prices in commodities, great returns, new entrants coming in, which we've already highlighted, lots of interest back on the, back on the front page of the Wall Street Journal at the weekends and so forth. And the question kind of Is are we right back at last year was a low volatility year in general, are we back for a period, a stretch of lower prices, lower volatility and dare I say it, some of these new entrants stop calling you or actually is there something going on which we've highlighted in the source of uncertainty that means that we can't expect the next 10 years to follow the normal cycle and there's something more structural going on that whilst prices might tend to be a little bit lower, we're still in for a long period of volatility change in opportunity in the commodities sector. I know that's a tough one. Go on Kush, we'll get around.
- [35:45]
C
I'm worried you're looking at me for an answer for that. From our point of view, we don't think that this is just going to go away and the volatility goes and we go back into that lower price commodity environment. There's just too many people in too high positions around the world that can make decisions relatively quickly to be in my mind, I don't want to use the word naive enough, but a bit naive to think that volatility is going to go away. There's big decisions in relatively few hands and for that reason I don't see volatility in our space, in the commodity space going away anytime soon.
- [36:29]
F
Nodding your head, I agree. And I mean I had to laugh the other day because our researchers were complaining that they had to yet again adjust their forecast at a much higher rate than what they're used to. And I mean, if anything, I think that amplifies a little bit sort of the time that we're in. Right. I think there is the volatile, I mean even if there is now trade agreements being made with China, with the uk, Trump himself I think will give a few more years of volatility. But it's not just that. I think there is a lot of long term, well established relationships have been questioned and anyone, if you think you've had a long term partner and all of a sudden he sort of steps you in the back and maybe retracts from that, but he has stepped you in the back. So I think you are going to see a change in landscape that is not just going to go away and therefore I do expect volatility to still be around for a number of years.
- [37:27]
A
I see a good time for the enemy.
- [37:28]
D
Yeah. So I'm very bad at making market forecasts. Fortunately I'm not allowed to. So that's good. But what I will say is our Biggest investment right now is in building out our electronic options market. So that will probably tell you where we think the opportunities are. And I think people will need an opportunity to exist in a high volatility environment. Environment.
- [37:47]
E
So yeah, I totally agree. It's volatility, unpredictability and I think it's interconnected. Right. Not a lot of these macro themes. So it's even harder to predict the potential outcomes. We haven't even touched on the impact of AI, for example, as well on every single industry, not just commodity trade, but certainly within the insurance sector. It's transforming how we do business. And that's a risk as well.
- [38:09]
A
Yeah, the technology volatility is real.
- [38:12]
B
I agree with everyone else and, and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to have volatility either. I think it creates opportunity for a lot of market participants. It reinforces the role that people play that are specialist providers in the commodity markets because you can react and you can navigate well the very volatile market that I think we're going to be in.
- [38:37]
A
Yeah, I love a gay. I, I, I do, I do think, and this is a recruiter talking, so you can just, you know, discount it. But I would, I would say that there's a, there is a chance that actually what you do see is a bit more of A, A5. You know, not all commodities move in such lockstep going forwards. I think there's very different narratives about each one. Particularly I think with metals and particular metals, you know, that effect of technology. Right. You suddenly see, oh well, the new batteries come out and cobalt's worthless or whatever it might be. So I think there's, I think Kush, your point about this, there's a lot of power is held in, in very few hands at this moment. And at least the trust in the institutions behind those hands to, to sway it back to the medium is perhaps not there as it historically was. But I also think you can probably say oil might have a different trajectory than certain metals or certain, you know, agricultural commodities and so forth. And I think that's where it wraps back to that kind of expertise bid. And actually the ability just to say all commodities are going up is perhaps not as true as it historically was.
- [39:43]
D
Thank you for listening.
- [39:45]
A
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