Tag: Merchandising

Trading on the international futures markets has often been compared to the game of chess. There are so many inputs to consider in futures trading, and so many possible moves, it has even been likened to three-dimensional chess. As in chess, you are never actually trading the various inputs; you are actually trying to second-guess how other market participants–or your opponent–will react to those inputs.

As Keynes so aptly put it, “Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.”

In his latest book, “21 Lessons for the 21^st Century”, Yuval Noah Harari describes how artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the world of chess. He writes,

“On 7 December 2017 a critical milestone was reached, not when a computer defeated a human at chess—that’s old news—but when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Stockfish 8 was the world’s computer chess champion for 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as to decades of human experience. It was able to calculate 70 million chess positions per second. In contrast, AlphaZero performed only 80,000 such calculations per second, and its human creators never taught it any chess strategies—not even standard openings. Rather AlphaZero used the latest machine learning principles to self-learn chess by playing against itself. …

Can you guess how long it took AlphaZero to learn chess from scratch, prepare for the match against Stockfish, and develop its genius instincts? Four hours. That’s not a typo. For centuries chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide”.

Human chess players have sidestepped the problem (for them) of artificial intelligence by banning computers from human chess tournaments. Mr Harari writes,

“In human-only chess tournaments, judges are constantly on the lookout for players who try to cheat by secretly getting help from computers. One of the ways to catch cheats is to monitor the level of originality players display. If they play an exceptionally creative move, the judges will often suspect that this cannot possibly be a human move—it must be a computer move”.

As in chess, computers are now better than humans at trading futures. Fortunately—or unfortunately—futures markets cannot—or will not—ban computers from trading. This presents something of a problem for the physical trading houses, which have always relied on profits from trading futures to bolster/offset the tiny/negative margins that they make on trading physicals. As yet, the trade houses have failed to find a replacement for those missing profits.

But apart from the difficulties faced by the trading houses, what does it matter if computers now trade better than humans?

Futures markets have two roles to play: the first is to set a price (price discovery); the second is to provide a hedging medium. If computers are better at setting a price than humans, and if they provide lots of liquidity for physical hedging, then surely the world is better off.

As Mr Harari warns however, the difficulty arises when algorithms understand humans better than we understand ourselves. Once they do, computers can manipulate humans. This may already have happened in recent elections. If algorithms can nudge us into how to vote in elections, they can also nudge us into actions (such as selling at the bottom or buying at the top) in the futures markets.

Once futures market algorithms start to take money from physical hedgers, hedging becomes more expensive. When that happens, value is taken from producers and consumers of the physical commodity. Farmers are worse off, as too are consumers.

Some might argue that in any case trade houses always took value from the supply chain when they made profits from futures trading, already making farmers and consumers worse off. In that sense the owners of the algorithms have merely taken their place; the profits now go to the computers rather than the trade houses.

However, trade houses added value back into the process by efficiently moving physical commodities around the world. Apart from setting prices, it is hard to see what value algorithms return to the supply chain.

There is no obvious solution to this. Algorithms continue to get smarter while traditional physical trade houses continue to search for alternative business models. As Mr Harari writes,

“Already today, computers have made the financial system so complicated that few humans can understand it. As AI improves, we might soon reach a point where no human can make sense of it.”

Images under creative commons from pixabay.com

In Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, the author Peter Hopkirk traces the origin of the Silk Road back to Chang Ch’ien, a young Chinese traveler who was sent by Wu-ti, the Han Emperor to make contact with the Central Asian people, the Yueh-chih. The Emperor was looking for allies in his continuing conflicts with the Hsiung-nu, the ravaging Huns of our history books.

Chang Ch’ien set out in 138 BC but was captured by the Huns and held prisoner for ten years before escaping and continuing his journey. He eventually contacted the Yueh-chih only to find that they had no interested in joining forces against the Huns. Chang Ch’ien headed for home, only to be captured once again, and eventually made it back thirteen years after he had set out. Undeterred, the Emperor sent him out on another mission westwards and (as Peter Hopkirk writes),

Not long after his return from this mission, the Great Traveler died, greatly honoured by his emperor, and still revered in China today. It was he who blazed the trail westwards towards Europe, which was ultimately to link the two superpowers of the day—Imperial China and Imperial Rome. He could fairly be described as the father of the Silk Road.

The author continues,

Although one of the oldest of the world’s great highways, The Silk Road acquired this evocative name comparatively recently…As a description, it is somewhat misleading. For not only did this great caravan route across China, Central Asia and the Middle East consist of a number of roads, but it also carried a great deal more than just silk. Advancing year by year as the Han emperors pushed China’s frontiers further westwards, it was ever at the mercy of marauding Huns, Tibetans and others. In order to maintain the free flow of goods along the newly opened highway, the Chinese were obliged to police it with garrisons and watchtowers.

One branch of the Silk Road ran west from Kashgar, starting with a long and perilous ascent of the High Pamir, the “Roof of the World”. Here it passed out of Chinese territory into Central Asia…continuing through Persia and Iraq to the Mediterranean coast. From there ships carried the merchandise to Rome and Alexandria.

As Mark Twain is reputed to have said (but apparently didn’t), “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”.

China (hopefully) does not want to conquer new territories, but it does want, and need, to conquer new markets for its goods. To do this it is investing heavily in new transport infrastructure eastwards through Central Asia and southwards through Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. Unlike (evidently) the US President, the Chinese realize that trade creates wealth.

Rather confusingly, the initiative is known in the western world as One Belt One Road, but the Chinese prefer to call it The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) or the Silk Road Economic Belt, or even The 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road. The original Silk Road was not one road, but a network of land and sea routes. The new “Silk Road” is the same, although it includes both road and train routes.

The relatively short (albeit 1,500km) section of the Silk Road that I travelled last month is called the Pamir Highway, and runs from Osh in Kyrgyzstan to Dushanbe in Tajikistan. It first heads south along the Chinese border across the Pamir Mountains, and then turns west along the Wakhan Valley. The valley separates the Pamir Mountains and the Hindu Kush. It  is an isolated part of the world with an extraordinary mix of cultures: twenty-five ethnic groups and twenty-five languages.

The route follows the tumultuous and unnavigable Panje River, on one bank Tajikistan and on the other Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, a narrow strip of land that was made part of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century to keep the Russian and British Empire apart. (For more on this fascinating period of history read Peter Hopkirk’s “The Great Game”.)

The Pamir Highway was in dire need of investment and improvement. Much of it was unpaved and single track, winding its way precariously along steep cliffs that dropped into the river below. I have no idea how the over-sized truck and trailer combinations that we saw on the road managed to make it from one end of the highway to another.

Some sections had been improved, and more works were being carried out, but the Tajik government is apparently wary of Chinese investment.

They probably shouldn’t be. Tajikistan is devoid of natural resources and is one of the poorest countries in Central Asia. Improving the transport infrastructure would not just permit Chinese goods to be imported more cheaply, it would help the country to develop as an important trading centre halfway between East and West.

The Jayma Bazaar, in Osh Kyrgyzstan, is one of the oldest in Central Asia and has existed on the same site for over two thousand years. The market stretches for more than one kilometre along the western bank of the Ak-Bura River, and has an estimated seven kilometres of alleyways and passages.

Osh is the second largest city in Kyrgyzstan and is situated near the country’s southern border with Uzbeckistan. The city is believed by some to be the location of the famous “Stone Tower”, which Claudius Ptolemy wrote about in his work Geography and which marked the midpoint on the ancient Silk Road between Europe and Asia.

Unsurprisingly for a city at the heart of the Silk Road Osh is known for its ethnic diversity. Traders from all China, Central Asia and Europe have been coming to Osh’s market for centuries and their social interaction has created a melting pot of different races and cultures. (Unfortunately this did not prevent strong anti-Uzbeck feeling from spilling over into a riot in June 2010 that left hundreds dead and destroyed parts of the market.)

The Jayma Bazaar is open seven days a week but I was lucky enough to visit it on Sunday, its busiest day. Many stalls are made from old container boxes and are grouped by product: one alleyway for shoes, another for hats. There is a meat and livestock section, as well as a square given over to craft blacksmiths making knives, horseshoes and cooking utensils.

The majority of the manufactured goods on sale were of Chinese origin, well-known brands that on closer inspection proved to be spelled wrong. Walking in the bazaar really drove home to me the extent to which China continually needs to expand the markets for its manufacturing sector. I began to understand better the important role that the country’s One Belt One Road initiative will play in China’s future development.

However a large section of the market was given over to seasonal fruits and vegetables with hundreds of stalls competing to sell apples, peaches, grapes and melons. There was also a huge quantity of dried fruits and nuts—raisins, apricots, dates, pistachios, walnuts, almonds and peanuts. China’s One Belt One Road project should also help Kyrgyzstan find export markets for its mainly agricultural economy.

That’s the good thing about trade and markets. They work both ways, and help all parties to better their lives.

Next week: Along the Silk Road from Osh to Dushanbe.

Wheat prices spiked last week, reaching a three-year high, and then fell back down after Ukraine issued confusing statements on possible export limits. The trouble started when Ukraine said on Facebook that it planned to limit shipments of milling wheat. The ministry later tried to clarify things by saying that it was not discussing “strict limits” and would instead discuss projected shipment volumes with traders. The wheat price fell back pretty much to where it came from. The move can be seen on the following graph from Bloomberg.

The episode set off a social media storm. Some traders complained that journalists had acted irresponsibly by reporting on the original Facebook post without first checking on its accuracy. Others argued that the Facebook post was in itself a market-relevant event (even ignoring what it contained) and that needed to be circulated as quickly as possible. 

In an (excellent) article published after the event, Agricensus explained that,

The big two providers that control 56% of the market – Bloomberg and Reuters – have spent vast sums of money on improving latency by milliseconds – hoping that it gives their clients an edge in trading.

That puts pressure to print stories and market moving headlines, leaving reporters with little time to corroborate, double-check or even question the most ambiguous statements made by ministers and even world leaders.

Some commentators on social media complained that the episode was just another example of fake news. Others argued that you shouldn’t be trading on Facebook posts in the first place—and that if you want good information you should pay for it. However this ignores the fact that the original post was picked up by the big newswire services. And as Agricensus points out,

Global spending on financial market data analysis and news exceeded $28 billion in 2017, according to consultants Burton Taylor International – up 3.6% on the previous year and the highest growth rate since after the financial crisis.

 People are already paying huge sums for “real” news.

However, the idea that if you want real rather than fake news then you have to pay for it is one of the themes of Yuval Harari’s new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. The book will be released at the end of August, but in a prepublication interview Mr Harari tells The Guardian,

The idea of free information is extremely dangerous when it comes to the news industry. If there’s so much free information out there, how do you get people’s attention? This becomes the real commodity. At present there is an incentive in order to get your attention – and then sell it to advertisers and politicians and so forth – to create more and more sensational stories, irrespective of truth or relevance. Some of the fake news comes from manipulation by Russian hackers but much of it is simply because of the wrong incentive structure. There is no penalty for creating a sensational story that is not true. We’re willing to pay for high quality food and clothes and cars, so why not high quality information?

The Guardian has also published an extract from the book in which Mr Harari writes, 

In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the stone age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws, and can thereby cooperate effectively.

He continues,

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda maestro and perhaps the most accomplished media-wizard of the modern age, allegedly explained his method succinctly by stating that “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth”. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” Can any present-day fake-news peddler improve on that?

Returning to the wheat market I understand that Ukraine always tracks and informally manages their wheat exports. Professional wheat traders were therefore surprised by the way that the market reacted to the Facebook post rather than by the Facebook post itself.

The post stampeded the herd—a herd that was already extremely nervous because of the extreme hot weather in many of the world’s wheat growing regions. Something else could have stampeded the herd: a rumour, say, or a big order hitting the screens—or even nothing at all. The herd was ready to stampede; it didn’t necessarily need an outside stimulus.

This type of situation is common in markets. Indeed, there was a lesser example just the week before when two famous wheat traders, Donald Trump and Jean-Claude Juncker announced that the EU would increase their purchases of US soybeans. The US soybean price rallied on the news and then fell again when the market realised that Trump and Juncker were not soybean traders after all.

There is an old commodity market saying that price will often go back to check out the extreme highs or lows made in a panic move, like the one in wheat last week. (This is not a prediction that the wheat price will return to last week’s highs, but I will be interested to see if it does.)

Finally, I had lunch with an old trader friend last week who reminded me that although traders love volatility, they don’t like political volatility; weather they can deal with, politics they can’t. Traders may or may not think that wheat prices will rise further on supply factors, but they have no way to foresee what the politicians will do in response.

As Bunge found out to their cost recently, it is dangerous to predict what politicians will do next, especially our present crop of politicians. As a result, traders normally increase the size of their bets in a fundamental market and reduce them in a political one.

Wheat has always been a “political” commodity; the current drought makes it even more so.

In his book Merchants of Grain (published in 1979), Dan Morgan describes the history of the grain trade and takes a look at what the future might hold for the five private companies—Cargill, Continental, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and André—that at that time dominated the business.

The early 1970s had been exceptionally profitable for those five companies, and the seven families that controlled them. The Soviet Union was redirecting resources away from industrial production and towards consumers. Increasing meat supply was an integral part of that plan, but to do that the USSR had to import large amounts of protein and animal feed.

This coincided, in 1972, with the failure of the anchovy season off the west coast of South America (anchovies/fish meal was a significant source of animal feed at that time), as well as poor weather in the Black Earth region of the USSR.

The first wave of Soviet buying in 1972 came to be known as the “Great Grain Robbery”, and resulted in rising food prices and domestic inflation in the USA. It also began to focus political attention onto the grain trade, something that intensified when the Soviets came in for a second round of buying in 1975.

But that buying was a double-edged sword. As Dan Morgan writes, “Opportunities for big profits, which the companies had looked forward to in the doldrums of the 1950s and 1960s, certainly were present. But the enormous volumes and the volatility also created unprecedented risks.”

Continental Grain learnt this the hard way when they underestimated the depth of the second round of Soviet buying; the grain giant sold physical corn short, expecting to cover their sales when prices fell later in the year. But corn prices didn’t fall; they continued to climb and the company covered their shorts at the top of the market.

For Michel Fribourg, the owner of Continental Grain, this was a traumatic event, and he declined to offer any further tonnage when the Soviets came back for more in October 1975. A few months later he reorganized the company, firing traders and employing risk and business managers instead. As Dan Morgan writes, the risk in these big sales was just too big: “The glory days of the grand slams in the Russian trade were over.”

He continues,

“Continental was not the only company to experience trading troubles. Most of the companies now insisted that the Soviet Union share more of the risks. Louis Dreyfus, for its part, set up a system of compensating balance sheets with the Russians. In effect it worked for the Russians on a fixed commission; losses in any given transaction would have to be recovered in profits on subsequent transactions…”

At that time most commodity imports were handled by central government agencies within the importing country. Governments were generally assumed to be more reliable counter-parties than the private sector, but this belief was shaken when in early 1975 wheat prices fell and “Turkey’s wheat-importing agency cancelled the wheat import contracts it had concluded at higher prices with Continental, Bunge, and Cargill.”

At the same time, the state buying agencies in importing countries had begun to attract the US government’s attention in terms of the inducements and bribes that the grain companies paid to civil servants and politicians to get the business done. A new light was being shone on these practices. A new morality began to take hold within the US, leading to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that was passed in 1977.

A new light was also being shone on the shipping and transportation of the physical grain, leading to an FBI investigation in short-loading and falsified shipping documents at the Mississippi grain loading terminals. In 1975 a grand jury in New Orleans “issued a total of thirty-one indictments, covering 265 federal criminal violations against forty-eight individuals…All kinds of activities came to light that showed how company employees schemed to misgrade or diminish the quantities of grain destined for foreign countries.”

Meanwhile, anti-competitive practices were also being brought under the spotlight. “In December 1976, the Interstate Commerce Commission held hearings in Chicago to determine why some small grain elevators inland had been unable to obtain covered hopper cars and grain boxes to move their commodities…The hearings showed what a close relationship existed between certain railroad companies and the grain firms.”

Physical trading margins within the agricultural supply chain were almost as thin in the 1970s as they are now, and the big trading companies largely made their profits by speculating massively on the futures markets that they themselves dominated. But there again a new morality was beginning to take hold with the formation in April 1975 of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, a new independent government agency to police the exchanges. It was formed “with fewer “policemen” than the Rockville, Maryland Police Department” and appeared to get off to a slow start, but it was a sign of things to come.

Perhaps more importantly, the big trading companies were already—in the 1970s—beginning to lose their domination of the agricultural futures markets.  Large well-financed speculators were moving in. The most famous were the Hunt brothers who had made a fortune early in the decade by squeezing the silver market. The brothers entered the soybean market in 1976, accumulating “approximately a third of the total beans that forecasters thought would be left over when the new soybeans from the 1977 crop became available. This was not a corner, but it was getting near to one”.

Their buying pushed prices higher and helped speed the demise of the publicly quoted Cook Industries, a former cotton trader that by the mid 1970s had begun to rival the traditional grain companies. “Within a year the company that Ned Cook had built into one of the highest-flying grain companies in the world had all but disappeared”. Cook was forced to sell its US grain elevators, allowing the Japanese trade houses Mitsui and Marubeni their long-awaited opportunity to get a foothold into the US grain business.

Taking all this together it is perhaps possible to pinpoint the start of the decline of the traditional grain business as a reaction to the massive price volatility and subsequent general inflation that followed the Russian purchases of US grain in the 1970s.

The grain companies had been hoping for such an event all through the doldrums of the 1950s and 1960s, but the consequences were greater government intervention and increased transparency, as well as the entry of well-financed speculators into markets that had previously been quietly local.

Bring those elements into a sector that was already struggling to cope with higher volumes and greater counter-party risks and you can begin to see that the writing was already on the wall. The era of seat-of-the pants buccaneering trading was on the way out; professional risk management, cost control and a new morality were on the way in.

Photos from Pixabay under Creative Commons

A close friend (and ex-trader) recently contacted me to argue that unlike services or many manufacturing industries the supply chain for commodities is a zero-sum game. The market fixes the price of the end product, so if one participant in a supply chain makes more money, someone else in the supply chain has to make less. The same applies to market share. As demand is static, or at best growing very slowly, if one producer sells more, another must sell less.

It is an interesting point. Everyone in a commodity supply chain is a price taker—they have to take whatever margin the market allows them. They only way they can make a bigger margin would be to use their market power to squeeze other supply chain participants in order that they make less. And, argues my friend, widespread communication, instant information, and all the other things that I have written about in the past, have reduced the market power of the agricultural trade houses. As a result, they now capture a smaller share of the margins in the chain.

This would probably change if the supply chain was disrupted for external reasons, such as crop failure, natural disaster, or war (whether armed or trade), but as the CEO of Cargill said a couple of weeks back, it is no longer enough to “rely on the occasional crop failure, export ban, or supply shortage to save the day.”

If we accept that a commodity supply chain is a zero sum game, there is a way of increasing your margins without taking money from your suppliers and clients: you can do it by cutting your costs. This can be done in a number of ways.

Cutting labour costs is often (usually) a company’s first response to margin pressure. Reducing headcount can do this, making the remaining employees work harder or more efficiently. Reducing salaries or, in the case of traders, bonuses is another option.

Companies can reduce costs by outsourcing specific tasks in the hope that other companies will be able to perform a function more cheaply that they can. (We saw this recently with Bunge closing their sugar trading department and letting other trade houses merchandise their production.)

Innovation, either in processes or technology, can help companies reduce labour costs and gain efficiency. Obvious examples include better communication between offices, data handling in offices, and mechanization (including robots) in manufacturing and handling. There is no reason to think that innovation will suddenly end. Indeed there is reason to think that the trend will accelerate, (for example blockchain and AI), enabling further cost reduction along the supply chain.

Farming is the one part of the agricultural supply chain that has probably benefited the most from innovation and technology. Hybrid seeds, more efficient farm machinery, improved pesticides and insecticides, as well as drone and GPS technology have all helped to reduce costs.

Economies of scale are a common source of cost reduction; building a one million tonne commodity processing plant or port loading facility will not cost twice as much as building a 500,000 tonne one. However the best way to reduce unit costs is to increase throughput; make sure that the capacity you have built is being used to its maximum.

Lastly, and this in the interest of everyone, companies can cut cost by reducing waste. The UN estimates that food waste and crop losses amount to close to one trillion dollars each year. That is a huge cost not just to the environment but also to the agricultural supply chain. Even making small inroads into that waste could significantly benefit the profitability of supply chain actors.

In a zero sum supply chain, the only way to increase your profits without picking others’ pockets is by reducing your costs. Unfortunately, what may work for an individual company (or farmer) may not work collectively.

One farmer can take advantage of innovation and technology to grow the same size crop from a smaller area, but his instinct will be to plant all his available land and produce more. To capture economies of scale a processor will build a mega-plant, and to reduce his unit costs he will look to maximize throughput. And, obviously, any success in reducing wastage will also increase available food supply.

There is therefore a tendency for cost cutting in a commodity supply chain to lead to increased supply. And increased supply usually results in lower prices. Acting alone, an individual player in the supply chain may be able to increase his margins by cutting costs. However, if everyone does it, the resulting extra production could result in a fall in price that negates the costs saved.

Looking at this in another way, economic theory tells us that the price of any particular commodity is, in the long term, determined by the marginal cost of production of that commodity’s most efficient producer. The more efficient the producer, the lower the cost.

Or looking at it from yet another angle, you have to ask, “Who has the market power?” If you are talking about Apple, it is the producer. If you talk about apples, it is the consumer. Where there is no product differentiation—and there is none in commodities—the market power lies with the consumer and not the producer.

Transforming commodities into ingredients can shift market power from consumers to producers. Some commodities, such as coffee and cocoa, are already losing their commodity status and are differentiated by origin. End-consumers are already willing to pay more for gluten-free, or lactose-free, or organic, or non-genetically modified, or locally produced food. And the big brands are willing to pay more (hopefully) for specific food varieties that fit their particular recipes.

That takes us back nicely to the beginning of this blog. Cost cutting can help restore margins for individual participants in the food supply industry, but it is not a solution for the supply-chain as a whole. The only way for the food supply chain to restore margins is by recapturing the market power that they have lost over recent decades. Crop failures or other disruptions would do that in the short term, but product differentiation is the only solution in the long term.

Image courtesy of Pixabay under creative commons

A friend recently sent me a link to one of the UK’s earliest-recorded “Commodity Conversations” – a letter sent by a certain Octavius to his brother Candidus in around AD 100. The letter is part of the Vindolanda tablets, a rich source of information about life on the northern frontier of Roman Britain. Written on fragments of thin, postcard sized wooden leaf-tablets with carbon-based ink, the tablets date to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD (roughly contemporary with Hadrian’s Wall – photo above).

The documents record official military matters as well as personal messages to and from members of the garrison of Vindolanda (photo below), their families, and their slaves. Highlights of the tablets include an invitation to a birthday party held in about 100 AD, which is perhaps the oldest surviving document written in Latin by a woman.

In his letter, Octavius uses a variety of financial idioms and a few technical terms. The letter shows entrepreneurial initiative; the sums of money and goods mentioned are significant. The two brothers are involved in the supply of goods, mainly animal hides and grains, to the military. There is no way of knowing whether Octavius is a civilian entrepreneur and merchant, or a military officer responsible for organising supplies for the Vindolanda garrison.

The letter refers to credit arrangements, evidence for the operation of a cash economy. He writes,

“I have several times written to you that I have bought about five thousand modii of ears of grain, on account of which I need cash. Unless you send me some cash, at least five hundred denarii, the result will be that I shall lose what I have laid out as a deposit, about three hundred denarii, and I shall be embarrassed. So, I ask you, send me some cash as soon as possible.”

He instructs his brother to

“See with Tertius about the 8½ denarii which he received from Fatalis. He has not credited them to my account. Know that I have completed the 170 hides and I have 119 modii of threshed bracis. Make sure that you send me cash so that I may have ears of grain on the threshing-floor. Moreover, I have already finished threshing all that I had.

He then writes about what appears to be a customer default,

A messmate of our friend Frontius has been here. He was wanting me to allocate (?) him hides and that being so, was ready to give cash. I told him I would give him the hides by 1 March. He decided that he would come on 13 January. He did not turn up nor did he take any trouble to obtain them since he had hides. If he had given the cash, I would have given him them.

As I wrote in my book, Commodity Conversations, commodity trading is much older than the Roman Empire:

In ancient Mesopotamia, around 1750 BC, the sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, created one of the first legal codes: the Code of Hammurabi. The code allowed for goods and assets to be sold for an agreed price for delivery at a future date. The code required contracts to be in writing and witnessed and allowed those contracts to be sold or assigned to others. This is the first recorded incidence of derivatives, in the form of forward and futures contracts, with trading carried out in the temples.

A few years back, Greg Page, at that time the executive chairman of Cargill, spoke at the FT Commodity Conference in Lausanne. He quoted Libanius, a Greek teacher of rhetoric, from his Orations III, written in the fourth century,

God did not bestow all products on all parts of the earth, but distributed his gifts over the different regions, to the end that men might cultivate a social relationship because one would have need of the help of another. And so he called commerce in to being, that all men might be able to have common enjoyment of the fruits of earth, no matter where produced.

Greg continued with his own view of the commodity business,

“Trading, or exchanging goods, has long underpinned human progress, and the interdependence that comes from trading creates the real capacity to raise living standards. Trading across national boundaries is a necessity, not a luxury, if the world wants to better serve the needs of its citizens. And as we face a global population reaching nine billion by midcentury, an even greater proportion of the world’s food will need to move across oceans to feed the people. National self-sufficiency in food will not suffice. Trading has always been important and will always continue to be so.”

There is not much I can add to that!

I participated last Sunday in the Vogalonga in Venice. The 30km race was restricted to human-powered boats, of which there were about 3,900, with around 8,000 rowers and paddlers. It was quite a spectacle!

As we were rowing through the canal in Murano we stopped at a (random) landing stage to change our crew around. The owner of the landing stage (and house) appeared with a bottle of sparkling wine and invited us into his garden for lunch. We gratefully accepted, spent over an hour with him and his wife, and gave up any hope of winning the race—not that we had any hope of doing so anyway!

As I rediscovered Venice during the rest of the weekend I was reminded how oriental the city is; at times I felt that I could have been in Bukhara in Uzbekistan or Isfahan in Iran. The city’s architecture, and its immense wealth, came from the fact that it was at the end of the Silk Road.

A Chinese TV crew interviewed us as we launched our boats before the race, and I was struck by the number of Asian tourists in the town. One local told us that the city was “flooded” now not by the sea but by a wave of Chinese tourists who were “travelling the new silk road” to Venice.

China is indeed building a new silk road: they call it “One Belt, One Road”. It is really two projects: The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road.

Costing as much as $8 trillion and affecting 65 countries, it will stretch from the edge of East Asia all the way to East Africa and Central Europe by the time of it’s estimated completion in 2049.

The Chinese government calls the initiative “a bid to enhance regional connectivity and embrace a brighter future,” while one speaker at the recent FT Commodity Conference in Lausanne described it as “the most important thing that is going on in the world that everyone is ignoring”.

The Washington Post recently criticised the initiative, suggesting that it might be a big mistake.  They wrote that the initiative “evokes romantic comparisons to the ancient Silk Road, but there is a more recent chapter of history that urges caution. More than a century and a half ago, the United States was a rising power racing westward, building transcontinental railways that delivered limited benefits and exacted a high cost from society.”

The first time I became aware of the One Belt One Road initiative was when I saw this sign a couple of years back above some road construction work in Central Asia,

This is a better map., originally from The Wall Street Journal, that shows the Maritime Belt stretching to Mombasa in Kenya and and the road/rail line to Rotterdam in Europe.

You can also find an excellent infographic here.

As we left our lunch hosts and headed back across the lagoon to Venice we were caught in an hour-long traffic jam as literally thousands of boats tried to enter the Canal Regio, the narrow but stunningly beautiful waterway that leads to the Grand Canal–and the end of our race in St Mark’s Square. As we inched our way forward through a tangle-mangle of dragon boats, rowing boats, canoes and pedalos, I couldn’t help thinking that if the Chinese had had anything to do with it they would have widened the Canal Regio years ago!

I am enjoying (re) reading Merchants of Grain, written by Dan Morgan and published in 1979. Many of the comments and observations in the book are still relevant today. Perhaps the most important one is this:

“..the (trading) companies managed to stay in the shadows most of the time. Perhaps it was the ancient nightmare of the middleman-merchant that made them so aloof and secretive—the old fear that in moments of scarcity or famine, the people would blame them for all misfortunes, march upon their granaries, drag them into the town square and confiscate their stocks.”

Government intervention has always been a threat. Socrates once wrote, “No man qualifies as a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problems of wheat”, while Lenin is credited with saying “Grain is the currencies of currencies”.

Describing the beginning of the US wheat trade in the 1850s, Dan Morgan writes:

“…margins of profit had to be extracted “upstream”—along the railway lines and at the storage terminals in the interior. In the struggle among farmers, merchants, millers, and exporters for their share of the wheat price that was determined in world markets, the advantage always went to those who controlled the storage and transportation of grain.”

But even, or perhaps especially, back then, technology was changing the way food was produced and distributed. Dan Morgan writes, “In 1837, it took 148 man-hours to plant, cultivate, and harvest an acre of wheat; in 1890 it was down to only 37 hours”. As for distribution, “In 1890, the four-masted Shenandoah, driven by a spread of two acres of canvas, left san Francisco with 5200 tons of wheat, the largest grain cargo on record up to that time.” One hundred years later it is now commonplace to ship cargoes of ten times that amount.

Profit margins have also changed in the past one hundred years. Dan Morgan writes, “Between 1883 and 1889, two large terminals in Minneapolis (Empire Grain and Minnesota and Northern Grain) averaged annual returns on capital investment of 40 percent and 30 percent respectively.” And in the 1920s a Federal Trade Commission study showed that US wheat exporters were making returns of more than 20 per cent on their funds deployed.

However, the good times were not to last forever. In the late 1940s a grain surplus “made for dull markets and extremely thin margins, and the zip went out of the business. It was a time when traders had to fight for a quarter of a cent a bushel, and this situation indelibly stamped and indeed altered the essential character of the companies…The grain trade was becoming not much more than a service business, which eked out a living on costs plus commissions”.

And as a reminder to those who forget the cyclical nature of our business, margins picked up with Russian imports in the 1960s and hit a zenith in the “Great Grain Robbery” of 1972 when millions of tons of grains were exported to Russia, restoring the fortunes of some traders and making the fortunes of others.

Dan Morgan describes the events of 1972 as “one of those economic events that, like the OPEC oil embargo the following year or the repeal of the Corn Laws more than a century earlier, can be truly to be said to have changed the world”. (He couldn’t get everything right!)

But most of his observations are still valid today. On the subject of farm surpluses, Dan Morgan writes, “Farm surpluses tended to occur in rich, industrial nations where had powerful, well-organised lobbies, rather than in developing countries where farmers were usually weak and underrepresented.”

And on the strength of character of the Russians. “If anything characterized the Soviet Union since the Revolution, it was its economic isolation and its determination to survive on its own. It was a Yugoslav Communist politician…who had told American officials in Washington in the late 1940s that his countrymen would rather eat grass than accept help from the West with strings attached.” (President Putin said the same thing last year.)

In 1912 Leopold Louis-Dreyfus wrote, “Our business fills a great human and economic need”. It did then, and it does now.

But I would like to leave the final word to Dan Morgan who sums it all up with, “Study grain long enough and the world shrinks”.