Trade Notes: Milk Most Likely to go the way of Onions in India

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I’d mentioned as long ago as March that milk prices are likely to spike higher.  The Economic Times delivered to my hotel room in Kolkata suggests this is coming true

After vegetables, now milk will also pinch consumers, as Gujarat‘s largest milk producer, Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) marketing dairy products under the brand ‘Amul‘ on Tuesday announced a pan-India hike in milk prices by Rs 2 per litre.

Trade Notes: buy Louis Dreyfus?

This is a much older story, first breaking in late September that has since gone into silent mode — probably as the deal-making is done or is killed by the majority owner.  Essentially, the 150-year old trader Louis Dreyfus Commodities is hoping to reinvent itself from a flow-trader agency trading commodities to someone who can bet its own balance sheet. 

Trade Notes: Is There a way to Play Global Warming and Weather Volatility?

 

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The short answer would be an easy “Yes”.  This was emphasised most recently by the September returns of Clive Capital, Chris Levett’s commodity hedge fund based on macro calls.  He used to run a similar portfolio at Moore Capital before he left to start up his own firm in December 2007 (in case you’re wondering,  his middle name is Clive).  That fund returned 6.6% last month, that’s a pretty tidy profit on roughly USD 4 billion AUM.  More so considering it was up around 1.7% for the previous nine months.  I’m not a big fan of Clive because they tend to use rather a lot of leverage, don’t communicate much, and haven’t been able to protect the downside as they claimed in their marketing material.  In any case, the reasons for the performance are interesting,

Trade Notes: Stay on With Long Gold Like Soros and Paulson?

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George Soros, notwithstanding his worry that Gold may be the ultimate bubble has stayed on his long Gold position.  He warns that

Gold is the only actual bull market currently. It just made a new high yesterday. In the present circumstances that may continue…

Background: Update on Armajaro

Reuters has an update on Armajaro’s main fund gaining only 0.6% in August.  This is not the smaller fund run by co-founder Anthony Ward that previously cornered the cocoa futures market.  That one was using cocoa for delivery and, according to Ward, had already got offloading arrangements for the 240,100 tons of cocoa to

Trade Notes: Got Milk?

Kind of weird corollary to India growing is that there is increasing milk demand in India.

The WPI in India has a 5% weight on milk, and that is having an effect because there was a 13.4% YoY inflation in milk prices in December ’09.  This is coming from a demand supply mismatch as there is an increasing uptake on processed milk products (most notably Reliance’s “Life”, Nestle’s “Pro-heart”, and Amul’s “Taaza”).