Where do the smart, furtune-seeking graduates go?

The answer to this question goes in waves, according to the zeitgeist, and mirrored by the (ridiculous) starting salaries on offer.  Someone might put approximate years to these, but by my reckoning these are what we've witnessed over the past several decades, in rough chronological sequence of their peak vogue.  There's obviously overlap.

-  McKinseys and the like

-  Tech, of the NASDAQ tech-boom vintage: (various flavours during that run, but at one time B2B was the thing)

-  Investment banks

-  Green investment vehicles

-  Hedge funds

-  "Blockchain" (as a buzzword) /  crypto

-  Commodities trading (as a specific hedgie emphasis)

-  "AI" (as a buzz-phrase) / LLMs

Now, it seems, space flight has a massive vogue.  This one differs a bit, because to enter this field at least a high percentage of recruits will need to be decent engineers of one stripe or another - actual hard graft!  For some of the others, BS + "potential" were the criteria; although the ability to do Hard Sums also featured.

So - what do your bright young acquaintances all aspire after?  What is going to cream off / trendily waylay the next generation of ambitious wannabes?

ND

Gold: a very traditional debating point

It's been a very long time since we last ran a thread on gold - it seems to be this one from 2015, when CU wrote: Gold hits a five year low; a positive message?

Well, turned out 2015 was not just a five-year low, it was a turning point, with gold on a rising trend thereafter,  There was a high in July 2020;  Russia's invasion of Ukraine didn't seem to register much; and the 2020 peak has been surpassed comfortably all this year.  Somebody will doubtless have a chart-based view: and I'd note that many key commodities seemed to have turned a corner just recently (certainly the energy-related ones I look at). 

Given that the gold market has many of the hallmarks** of a fair & easy place to invest and trade - deep liquidity; transparency; security (if you don't get suckered by the wrong platform) - the old discussion-points bear dusting off.  Do we have here the perfect hedge against Bad News?   That tends to be my way of looking at it.  Was 2015 a good year for news?  There's certainly a load of grim tidings circulating this year.  Of course, some folk view gold like others see Bitcoin - a market phenomenon with plenty of emotion & sentiment surrounding it, but nothing to take seriously.

What do we think?  Over to t'readership.

ND

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** sorry about that

Banking Crisis - again ...

Commodities down on banking stress

Here at C@W we pride ourselves on having spotted the "2008" banking crisis in the summer of 2007, when two German banks went down, followed by Northern Rock - all three being canaries in the dank, dirty coalmine of culpably fatuous and irresponsible banking strategies being practised deep underground, that turned out to be systemic.

So what's happening now?  It doesn't look good.

• Silicon Valley and Signature
• Deutsche Bank (again) and Credit Suisse
• risk to economic recovery due to reduced bank lending
• likely response of the authorities: back to QE! (interest rates coming off already ...)

Thus far, the current banking woes have been accompanied by a pronounced downtick in commodity prices.  If, on the basis of economic contraction, that persists then maybe inflation doesn't just take off again with QE ... and people are forever pronouncing on the Chinese property market ... but I'm no good at predicting these macro phenomena.  (What's more, I don't know who is.)  Are you out there, CU?!

ND

A copper-bottomed bet?

It's been a bloodbath for many years in the commodity sector. Many shirts have been lost (a few of mine even, tear-stained ones...). The price of oil is normally one of the key metrics along with gold for assessing asset inflation.


However, gold is only around $1300 an ounce, which whilst double the 2008 low is a long way off the $2000 plus highs. In fact, there has not been much movement in gold at all this year, as compared to say Bitcoin which is rapidly taking shape as the future of independent store of value.


Then we come to oil, off its $30 lows of the post-shale revolution, but still only around $50 a barrel and that is after some small, but actual, production cuts from OPEC. The supply side still looks strong though and this at a time when global non-recessionary GDP growth is de-coupling from the oil price/supply for virtually the first time in a hundred years.


Which leads one to look further afield and this for me is to copper;





Copper looks interesting, the world's biggest miners have been struggling with various geopolitical events and supplies are not increasing that rapidly. The building of China still is eating capacity but the new found desire for electric vehicles also implies a long-term demand surge for the metal that is the core of the electricity transmission industry (of course, Lead/Lithium are looking good too). So demand is growing whilst supply is relatively flat.


I wonder if long-term there may even be a good long/short bet on copper versus oil as the switch away from petrol and diesel cars takes hold over the next five year?