@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily 1.0.30 → 1.0.31

package/covered.md

@@ -11,3 +11,4 @@ Running log. Read before writing a new episode: avoid repeating material, and on
 - **Ep 7** (Tue) — *WASDE and Building a Balance Sheet*: How a grain balance sheet is built line by line, and why ending stocks — the line nobody measures — moves about ten times faster than the crop itself. Plus feed and residual, the line that hides the sins, and why two competent analysts agree on supply and fight about demand.
 - **Ep 8** (Wed) — *The Soybean Complex and the Crush*: One seed, three markets: beans, meal and oil, and the processing margin that runs the industry. Board crush arithmetic step by step, why the plant never earns the screen number, and where a crusher's real optionality sits.
 - **Ep 9** (Thu) — *Vegetable oils and biofuels*: Palm, soy, rape and sun trade as one system, and the spread between them is the switch that rations demand. Then biofuels: how a mandate turns a political decision into a standing bid for a crop, and why a fuel policy is always a protein policy.
+- **Ep 10** (Fri) — *Freight: Dry Bulk and Chartering*: Freight and chartering: vessel classes by deadweight (Handysize, Supramax, Panamax/Kamsarmax, Capesize), deadweight is not cargo, draft and gear as the hard constraints that pick the class, part cargoes; Baltic indices as broker route assessments converted to a time charter equivalent in dollars per day, not a payable price; the Supramax-over-Panamax earnings inversion explained as different trades; voyage charter (dollars per tonne, owner carries the queue) versus time charter (dollars per day, charterer carries it); TRADER/CHARTERER dialogue on fixing sixty-six Santos first-half October. Worked examples: same 66,000 t Santos-Qingdao cargo on a Kamsarmax at 17.24 USD/t versus a Supramax at 22.53 USD/t (31 percent worse, higher rate over fewer tonnes); P7 US Gulf-Qingdao 73.81 against P8 Santos-Qingdao 51.98 as the origin arb; buy FOB Santos sell CFR Qingdao at 74 gross, 52 freight, 6 costs = 16 USD/t margin = 1.056m on 66kt, then freight +20 turns it to -4 USD/t = -264k with the board unmoved, equal to 22,000 USD/day of extra hire. Depth: selling CFR unfixed is structurally short freight and no position sheet carries it at grain resolution, FFAs hedge a basket not your voyage (cross-hedge callback to ep 5), bunkers at 30 t/day as an oil-market term inside the margin, and why merchants charter rather than own (25-year asset for a 60-day problem, cargo knowledge is not ship knowledge, shipping cyclicality, access as the real reason to own). Pulse: Thu 20 Aug CBOT closes with corn leading and Dec above five dollars, beans narrowly mixed, meal down and oil up, wheat marginally higher, BDI 2791; Pro Farmer tour Illinois corn 184.2 against 199.6 year-ago and Illinois bean pods 1430 against 1479; weekly export sales 41m bu corn, 66m bu beans, 14.5m bu wheat; China new-crop commitments 5.69 mmt plus 3.82 mmt unknown; Pulse: Sea of Azov closed to Russian grain by Ukrainian strikes, read as a vessel-class constraint rather than a tonnage constraint because Azov is a shallow river-sea trade no Panamax can substitute into.

package/ep10.md

@@ -0,0 +1,312 @@
+# Freight: Dry Bulk and Chartering
+
+## Market pulse
+
+**Corn took the session, and the most interesting price on the screen was not a grain at all.**
+
+| Commodity | Contract | Price | Change |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| Corn | Sep (CBOT) | 478¾ c/bu | +5¾¢ |
+| Corn | Dec (CBOT) | 503½ c/bu | +5½¢ |
+| Soybeans | Nov (CBOT) | 1236½ c/bu | −¾¢ |
+| Soybeans | Jan (CBOT) | 1251½ c/bu | +¼¢ |
+| Soymeal | Sep (CBOT) | — | −1.0% |
+| Soyoil | Sep (CBOT) | — | +2.0% |
+| Wheat SRW | Sep (CBOT) | 682¾ c/bu | +2½¢ |
+| Wheat HRW | Sep (KC) | 762¼ c/bu | +¼¢ |
+| Baltic Dry Index | — | 2,791 | +15 |
+
+Corn was the clear winner and December closed above five dollars. The buying is coming from the Pro Farmer scouts, who keep walking out of fields with less than last year. Illinois was pegged at 184.2 bu/ac against 199.6 a year ago and a three-year average of 199.2. Indiana, Nebraska, western Iowa, South Dakota and Ohio all came in below average. Illinois soybean pod counts at 1,430 per three-by-three square were under last year's 1,479 but above the three-year average of 1,390, which is the split that keeps beans flat while corn rallies.
+
+Beans were narrowly mixed and the complex went the other way from Wednesday: meal off about 1%, oil up about 2%. Weekly export sales were unremarkable at 41 m bu of corn, 66 m bu of beans and 14.5 m bu of wheat. New-crop Chinese commitments now stand at 5.69 mmt with a further 3.82 mmt to unknown destinations — still a promise on a balance sheet rather than a fact on a vessel.
+
+**The geopolitical read: the missing thing is a ship, not a tonne.** Ukrainian strikes have left Russia unable to move grain through the Sea of Azov. The transmission most people reach for is export capacity, and that is right, but the mechanism underneath it is vessel class. Azov is a shallow river-sea trade worked by 3,000–5,000 t coasters drawing under five metres. No Panamax can substitute into that water. The cargo has to be railed or trucked several hundred kilometres to deepwater at Novorossiysk, which is carrying its own constraints. Capacity does not shrink because tonnage vanished. It shrinks because the only ships that fit are the ones that cannot sail.
+
+```chart
+{"type":"bar","unit":"USD per day","title":"The smaller ship costs more",
+ "x":["Capesize","Panamax","Supramax","Handysize"],
+ "series":[{"name":"Average time charter equivalent","values":[39684,18964,20651,15605]}],
+ "caption":"A Supramax is roughly a third smaller than a Panamax and earned 1,687 dollars a day more. The classes are not one ladder — they serve different trades, and US Gulf Supramax routes have been firming while Asia-Pacific has gone quiet.",
+ "source":"Baltic Exchange sub-index average earnings, Wednesday 19 August 2026."}
+```
+
+## Key takeaways
+
+- Vessel class is chosen by draft, gear and lot size, and only then by price. Read the berth before you read the index.
+- Deadweight is not cargo. An 82,000 dwt Kamsarmax carries roughly 66,000 t of beans once fuel, water and stores are aboard.
+- Baltic index points are not a price. They are a broker panel's route assessments converted into a time charter equivalent in dollars per day, and nobody can pay an index.
+- Dollars per tonne and dollars per day are the same freight under two different risk allocations. A voyage charter leaves the queue with the owner; a time charter buys it back onto your book.
+- A smaller vessel can be more expensive twice over — a higher day rate spread across fewer tonnes. On today's rates that is 30% more per tonne on the same cargo.
+- The moment a CFR sale is made and no vessel is fixed, the seller is short freight. The grain hedge does nothing about it, and no position sheet carries freight at the resolution it carries corn.
+- Twenty dollars a tonne of freight on a Panamax cargo is about 22,000 dollars a day of hire. That is an ordinary quarter in a market that has better than doubled inside twelve months.
+- FFAs hedge an index built from a basket of named routes, not your voyage. It is the same cross-hedge problem as pricing Black Sea wheat off Matif.
+- Bunkers sit underneath the freight. A Panamax burns about 30 t a day at sea, so a hundred-dollar move in fuel is seventeen percent of a sixteen-dollar margin, decided in the oil market.
+- Merchants charter rather than own because a ship is a twenty-five-year position taken to solve a sixty-day problem, and because knowing where the cargo is and knowing where the ship is are different businesses.
+
+## Vocabulary
+
+| Term | Meaning |
+|---|---|
+| **Deadweight (dwt)** | The total weight a vessel can carry — cargo plus fuel, water, stores and crew — so always more than the cargo it can load |
+| **Draft** | The depth of hull below the waterline, which rises as the ship loads and is the hard physical limit on which berths and rivers a vessel can enter |
+| **Handysize** | The smallest mainstream dry bulk class, roughly 10,000–40,000 dwt, geared and able to work berths larger ships cannot reach |
+| **Supramax** | A dry bulk vessel of roughly 50,000–60,000 dwt, normally carrying its own cranes, which works minor bulks and shorter legs |
+| **Panamax / Kamsarmax** | The 75,000–82,000 dwt workhorse of the grain and coal trades, usually gearless and drawing about fourteen metres fully loaded |
+| **Capesize** | A bulk carrier of about 180,000 dwt and up, too large for the Panama Canal, used mainly for iron ore and coal |
+| **Geared vessel** | A ship carrying its own cranes, which can therefore discharge at a berth with no shore equipment |
+| **Part cargo** | Loading a vessel below capacity because the berth, river or canal cannot take her full draft |
+| **Baltic Dry Index (BDI)** | The Baltic Exchange's headline dry bulk freight index, a weighted composite of the Capesize, Panamax, Supramax and Handysize route assessments |
+| **Time charter equivalent (TCE)** | A voyage's economics restated as dollars per day, which is how a shipowner compares one employment against another |
+| **Voyage charter** | Hiring a vessel to move a stated cargo between named ports for a price in dollars per tonne, with the owner carrying the voyage and delay risk |
+| **Time charter** | Hiring the vessel itself for a period at a price in dollars per day, with the charterer taking speed, weather, port delay and usually fuel |
+| **Fixing** | Agreeing the charter of a specific vessel, the moment a freight exposure stops being open |
+| **Forward freight agreement (FFA)** | A cash-settled swap on a Baltic index route or basket over a calendar month, the only liquid way to hedge freight |
+| **Bunkers** | The vessel's fuel, priced separately from the hire and carried by the owner on a voyage charter and by the charterer on a time charter |
+| **P7 / P8** | Baltic Panamax route codes for US Gulf to Qingdao and Santos to Qingdao, the two assessments that set the soybean origin arb |
+| **River-sea vessel** | A small shallow-draft ship built to work both inland waterways and short sea legs, the only class able to load in the Sea of Azov |
+| **Demand-to-supply ratio** | The Baltic's measure of tonne-mile demand growth against fleet growth, above 1.0 when cargo is outrunning ships |
+
+## Quiz
+
+**Q1.** A trader has 66,000 t of soybeans to move from Santos to Qingdao and can use either a Kamsarmax at 18,964 $/day or two Supramaxes at 20,651 $/day carrying 33,000 t each. Assume a 60-day round voyage for either class. Compute the freight cost per tonne both ways and state the difference in total dollars. Then give the two physical conditions under which the more expensive option is the only option, and explain why the day-rate comparison alone is the wrong first question.
+
+**Q2.** A desk buys 66,000 t FOB Santos and sells the same cargo CFR Qingdao at a gross spread of $74.00/t. Freight is expected at $52.00/t and other costs run $6.00/t. The board is fully hedged and both differentials are fixed in writing. The vessel is not yet fixed. Compute the expected margin in dollars per tonne and in total. Then recompute after freight rallies $20/t. Express that $20 as an equivalent change in daily hire, say which of the desk's risks was actually open, and name the instrument that would have covered it and the residual risk that instrument leaves behind.
+
+**Q3.** Baltic assessments this week put US Gulf–Qingdao at $73.81/t and Santos–Qingdao at $51.98/t. A Chinese crusher is indifferent between origins on delivered cost. US Gulf beans are offered FOB at a differential 15 c/bu *below* Santos. Convert that differential to dollars per tonne, combine it with the freight spread, and say which origin wins and by how much. Then explain what has to happen to the freight spread — not to the differentials — before the US Gulf becomes competitive, and why a Brazilian exporter watches the Panama Canal draft restrictions more closely than he watches CBOT.
+
+**Q4.** *(Ep 9)* Ep 9 established that a mandate creates demand that does not respond to price. Indonesia funds its B50 subsidy from a palm export levy it raised from 10% to 12.5%. Explain why a rising levy rate is a bearish signal for the programme's durability even though it is a bullish signal for palm prices today. Then say what a freight desk would want to know about Indonesian export volumes before pricing a Panamax to Rotterdam six months forward.
+
+**Q5.** *(Ep 9)* On Thursday soymeal fell about 1% while soyoil rose about 2%. Using ep 9's point that oil demand and meal demand are joined at the bushel, explain what that split does to the board crush and to the oil share, and say which of the two products a crusher would rather see lead a rally if the plant is running at capacity.
+
+**Q6.** *(Ep 7)* Ep 7 established that ending stocks is a residual roughly a tenth the size of production, so a 1% crop error is a 10% carryout error. Pro Farmer has Illinois corn at 184.2 bu/ac against USDA's national 180.7. Explain why a state number above the national number is not evidence that USDA is too low, and set out the two things you would need before letting a tour result move your own balance sheet.
+
+**Q7.** *(Ep 7)* A desk's own corn sheet uses 88.6 m harvested acres and its own yield. It wants to test how much of a yield miss the export line could absorb before the carryout falls below 1.400 bn bu. Starting from a carryout of 1.653 bn, compute how many bushels of cushion exist, convert that into bushels per acre of yield, and then explain why using exports as the offsetting line is a different kind of assumption from using feed and residual.
+
+**Q8 — Conversion drill.** A Rouen exporter is offered Matif November milling wheat at €218/t. A competing cargo is quoted CFR Rotterdam at $268/t. Assume EUR/USD at 1.16. Put both on the same currency and say which is cheaper, and by how much in euros per tonne. Then, if freight from the Black Sea to Rotterdam is $18/t, compute the implied FOB Black Sea value of that cargo in both dollars and euros per tonne.
+
+## SOLUTIONS (spoilers)
+
+**A1.** Take the hire first, then divide by what actually loads.
+
+| | Kamsarmax | Two Supramaxes |
+|---|---|---|
+| Cargo | 66,000 t | 2 × 33,000 t |
+| Day rate | $18,964 | $20,651 each |
+| Days | 60 | 60 |
+| Total hire | $1,137,840 | $2,478,120 |
+| **Freight per tonne** | **$17.24** | **$37.55** |
+
+The two-ship answer is roughly $20.31/t worse, or **$1,340,280** on the cargo. That is the compounding penalty: a higher rate spread over half the tonnes each, twice.
+
+The realistic version is a single 55,000 t Supramax at **$22.53/t**, $5.29/t worse than the Kamsarmax — still about 31% more freight for the same job.
+
+The two conditions that force the smaller ship are **draft** and **gear**. If the discharge berth carries nine metres of water, a loaded Kamsarmax at fourteen metres cannot enter, and part-cargoing her destroys the per-tonne advantage anyway. If the berth has no shore cranes, only a geared vessel can discharge, and Panamaxes are usually gearless. A third, softer condition is **lot size**: a buyer who wants 55,000 t is not going to take 66,000 t to help your freight.
+
+The trap is the day-rate comparison. Freight per tonne has a numerator and a denominator, and the denominator is set by physics — hydrography and crane fitting — not by the market. The first question is what the berth can take. Only then does the rate matter.
+
+**A2.** The margin, twice.
+
+| | As expected | After the rally |
+|---|---|---|
+| Gross spread (CFR sale − FOB buy) | $74.00/t | $74.00/t |
+| Freight | −$52.00/t | −$72.00/t |
+| Finance, insurance, port | −$6.00/t | −$6.00/t |
+| **Margin** | **$16.00/t** | **−$4.00/t** |
+| **On 66,000 t** | **$1,056,000** | **−$264,000** |
+
+A swing of **$1,320,000** with the board never moving.
+
+As daily hire: $20/t × 66,000 t = $1,320,000, spread over 60 days, is **$22,000/day**. Hire would have to go from about $18,964 to roughly $41,000 — near today's Capesize level. The Baltic Dry Index has ranged from 1,261 to 2,845 over the past 52 weeks, better than a double, so that is not an exotic scenario. It is a bad quarter.
+
+The open risk was **freight**, and it was open because the desk sold CFR. Selling CFR means promising delivered cargo at a fixed price while still having to buy the ocean leg. That is structurally short freight. It hid because a position sheet has columns for bushels and lots and none for tonne-miles.
+
+The instrument is an **FFA** — a cash-settled swap on the Baltic Panamax index, sized to the freight exposure, bought (long) to cover a short-freight position. The residual is **basis risk in a new suit**. The FFA settles against the P5TC basket average over a calendar month. The exposure is one voyage, on one route, fixed on one day. The Santos route can move against the basket, the fixing date can miss the settlement window, and the tonnage mismatch is never exact. It is the Black Sea wheat problem from ep 5, wearing shipping clothes.
+
+**A3.** Convert the differential first. Soybeans run 36.7439 bu/t, so 15 c/bu × 36.7439 ÷ 100 = **$5.51/t**.
+
+| | US Gulf | Santos |
+|---|---|---|
+| FOB differential | −$5.51/t | reference |
+| Freight to Qingdao | $73.81/t | $51.98/t |
+| **Delivered, relative** | **+$68.30/t** | **+$51.98/t** |
+
+Santos wins by **$16.32/t**. The freight spread is $21.83/t and the FOB discount recovers only a quarter of it.
+
+For the US Gulf to compete, the freight spread has to close by more than $16.32/t on its own — the differential is not going to do it, because 15 c/bu is already a serious concession and $16.32/t is another 44 c/bu on top. Freight spreads move for structural reasons: Panama Canal transit availability and draft restrictions, Capesize demand pulling Panamax tonnage out of the Atlantic, US Gulf river levels forcing part cargoes, and the seasonal ballast pattern that leaves ships positioned in the wrong ocean.
+
+The Brazilian exporter watches canal draft because it is the cheapest lever on his competitor's cost. A draft restriction at Gatún adds days and dollars to every US Gulf–Asia voyage, or pushes it around the Cape of Good Hope, and every dollar of that lands on the delivered price of the beans he is competing with. CBOT moves both origins together and nets out of the arb. The canal moves only one of them.
+
+**A4.** The two signals point in opposite directions because they are about different horizons.
+
+Today the levy is **bullish palm**: a higher export tax raises the FOB price a foreign buyer must pay and withdraws exportable supply, which is a supply shock decided in a ministry rather than in a plantation.
+
+For the programme it is **bearish**, because the levy is the funding mechanism and the mandate's purpose is to shrink the export base the levy is collected on. A subsidy funded by a tax on the thing it is designed to reduce has to raise the rate as it succeeds. The rate is therefore the honest gauge of affordability. A rising rate says the per-tonne burden on a shrinking export volume is climbing, which is exactly the path toward a mandate that gets quietly deferred.
+
+A freight desk pricing a Panamax to Rotterdam six months forward wants **export volume, not price**. Freight is paid on tonne-miles. If B50 plus the levy takes several million tonnes a year out of the Indonesian export programme, that is Panamax and Supramax cargoes that stop existing on the Indonesia–Europe and Indonesia–India legs, and tonnage that has to reposition or accept lower rates. The palm price can rise while the freight demand it generates falls. Those are not the same trade.
+
+**A5.** Oil up 2% and meal down 1% moves the **oil share** up and does very little for the **board crush**, which is a weighted difference rather than a level.
+
+Meal is the larger revenue line for a US crusher — a bushel yields roughly 44 lb of meal and 11 lb of oil — so a 1% loss on meal is close to offsetting a 2% gain on oil in absolute dollars. Beans were roughly unchanged, so the crush was roughly unchanged: a flat day disguised as a two-way move.
+
+If the plant is **running at capacity**, the crusher would rather see **meal** lead. Meal is where the tonnage is, and meal has to be sold locally into a feed market that cannot be arbitraged across an ocean cheaply. An oil-led rally is the one the crusher captures least of, because meeting the oil demand forces out four pounds of meal for every extra pound of oil, and that meal has to find a home at whatever price clears it. This is the joined-at-the-bushel constraint: at capacity there is no volume response available, so the only thing that helps is the price of the product you are already making the most of.
+
+**A6.** A state yield above a national yield is not evidence of anything, because they are different populations. The national number is an area-weighted average across all producing states, and it includes the ones the tour has just called below average — Nebraska, South Dakota, Ohio, Indiana, western Iowa. Illinois is usually one of the strongest corn states in the country. Its yield sits above the national average in almost every year, so 184.2 against a national 180.7 says nothing until it is compared with **Illinois's own history**, which is 199.6 last year and 199.2 on a three-year average. On that basis it is a very large miss, not a beat.
+
+Two things are needed before a tour result moves a sheet. First, the **methodology gap**: Pro Farmer counts ears and measures grain length in a sample of fields on a fixed route in mid-August, then applies a fixed kernel-weight factor. USDA's August number comes from a farmer survey plus objective plot counts, and it will be revised as kernel weight is actually measured in September and October. The tour is a good early read on ear counts and a poor read on final kernel weight, and kernel weight is where the last ten bushels live. Second, the **weighting**: a yield is worth nothing without harvested area behind it. Moving Illinois down fifteen bushels changes the national number by roughly the ratio of Illinois harvested acres to the US total, so the arithmetic has to be done state by state and weighted, not intuited from a headline.
+
+**A7.** The cushion first.
+
+| | Bushels |
+|---|---|
+| Carryout, USDA | 1,653,000,000 |
+| Target floor | 1,400,000,000 |
+| **Cushion** | **253,000,000** |
+
+Across 88.6 m harvested acres that is 253 ÷ 88.6 = **2.86 bu/ac**. A yield of 180.7 falling to about **177.8** takes the carryout to 1.400 bn, all else equal.
+
+Using **exports** as the offsetting line is a behavioural assumption. Exports are a competitive outcome: they depend on what Brazil has, on freight, on FX, on Chinese buying policy. If the crop shrinks and the price rises, exports should fall, so the two lines are genuinely linked and the offset has an economic story behind it. But it is a forecast about other people's decisions, and it can be wrong in either direction for a whole season.
+
+Using **feed and residual** is a different animal, because that line is not measured at all. It is backed out of the quarterly Grain Stocks survey, so it absorbs both real livestock feeding and every measurement error in production and in stocks. Flexing it is not a demand forecast — it is an admission that the sheet does not balance and a decision about where to put the difference. Both are legitimate. But one is a view on the world and the other is a view on your own arithmetic, and confusing them is how a desk convinces itself it has an edge when it only has a rounding error.
+
+**A8 — Conversion drill.** Cross the currency first.
+
+| | Quote | Conversion | Common currency |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| Matif Nov milling wheat | €218/t | × 1.16 | $252.88/t |
+| CFR Rotterdam cargo | $268/t | ÷ 1.16 | €231.03/t |
+
+The Matif value is the cheaper of the two, by **$15.12/t**, or **€13.03/t**.
+
+Now back the freight out of the imported cargo. CFR Rotterdam $268/t less $18/t of freight leaves an implied **FOB Black Sea of $250.00/t**, which at 1.16 is **€215.52/t**.
+
+Which is the useful part of the exercise: the imported cargo looked $15 expensive on a delivered basis, but its FOB value sits €2.48/t *below* the Matif quote. The freight was carrying the entire difference and then some. Any Matif-versus-origin comparison that skips the freight leg is comparing two prices that were never quoted on the same terms.
+
+## The written edition
+
+Yesterday a Supramax bulk carrier earned $20,651 a day. A Panamax, about a third bigger, earned $18,964. The smaller ship was the more expensive ship, and it was the more expensive ship per tonne by a much wider margin than that gap suggests.
+
+That inversion is a good place to start, because it breaks the intuition that the dry bulk fleet is a ladder with cheap small ships at the bottom and expensive large ones at the top. It is not a ladder. It is four separate markets that happen to be measured on the same page.
+
+### The fleet, and why the sizes are not arbitrary
+
+The classes, in deadweight tonnes:
+
+| Class | Deadweight | Typical cargo | Gear |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| Handysize | 10,000–40,000 dwt | Minor bulks, short legs | Geared |
+| Supramax | 50,000–60,000 dwt | Minor bulks, grain part cargoes | Geared |
+| Panamax / Kamsarmax | 75,000–82,000 dwt | Grain, coal | Usually gearless |
+| Capesize | 180,000 dwt and up | Iron ore, coal | Gearless |
+
+**Deadweight is not cargo.** It is everything the ship can carry: cargo, bunkers, fresh water, stores, crew and their effects. An 82,000 dwt Kamsarmax sailing Santos to Qingdao is carrying something like 3,000 tonnes of fuel before a single bean goes in the hold. She loads roughly 66,000 t. Treating dwt as cargo capacity overstates a cargo by a fifth, and that error propagates straight into a freight-per-tonne number.
+
+The classes exist because of **draft** — the depth of hull below the waterline, which increases as the ship loads. A fully laden Panamax draws about fourteen metres. A very large number of the world's berths, rivers and approach channels cannot take fourteen metres. When they cannot, there are exactly two options: load the big ship partly full, which is called a **part cargo** and throws away the scale advantage, or take a smaller ship.
+
+The second constraint is **gear**. A Supramax normally carries its own cranes. A Panamax normally does not. If the discharge berth has no shore equipment, the vessel class has already been decided, and no freight rate changes that.
+
+This is why the Sea of Azov story is a vessel-class story rather than a tonnage story. Azov is shallow water worked by 3,000–5,000 t river-sea vessels drawing under five metres. When that trade is shut, the world's spare Panamax tonnage is entirely irrelevant to it. The ships that fit cannot sail, and the ships that can sail do not fit.
+
+### The screens: what a Baltic index actually is
+
+The Baltic Exchange publishes a headline index, the BDI, and a sub-index for each class. On Thursday the BDI printed 2,791, up 15.
+
+Here is the unit moment that matters most on this subject: **those points are not a price, and nobody can pay them**. The Baltic surveys a panel of shipbrokers each day on a fixed basket of named routes, then converts the assessments into a **time charter equivalent** — TCE, in dollars per day. That is the number a shipowner thinks in, because it is what lets him compare a grain voyage against a coal voyage against a period fix.
+
+| Index | Points | Average earnings |
+|---|---|---|
+| Capesize (BCI) | 4,376 | $39,684/day |
+| Panamax (BPI) | 2,107 | $18,964/day |
+| Supramax (BSI) | 1,634 | $20,651/day |
+| Handysize (BHSI) | 867 | $15,605/day |
+
+Read the middle two again. The Supramax is the smaller vessel and it is earning more per day. They are different trades: Panamaxes live on coal and large grain lots, Supramaxes on minor bulks and shorter legs, and US Gulf Supramax routes have been firming recently while Asia-Pacific has gone quiet.
+
+```chart
+{"type":"bar","unit":"USD per tonne","title":"Same cargo, two vessel classes",
+ "x":["Kamsarmax, 66,000 t","Supramax, 55,000 t"],
+ "series":[{"name":"Freight cost per tonne","values":[17.24,22.53]}],
+ "caption":"A 60-day round voyage at Wednesday's rates. The Supramax costs 31% more per tonne — a higher day rate spread across fewer tonnes, so the penalty compounds. Nobody chooses this. The berth chooses it.",
+ "source":"Worked example, episode 10, using Baltic average earnings of 18,964 and 20,651 USD per day."}
+```
+
+### The two currencies of freight
+
+Freight is quoted two ways, and fluency in both is not optional.
+
+| | Voyage charter | Time charter |
+|---|---|---|
+| Unit | $/tonne of cargo | $/day of hire |
+| What you buy | Carriage of a stated cargo between named ports | The vessel itself, for a period |
+| Weather and speed risk | Owner | Charterer |
+| Port queue and delay | Owner (subject to laytime and demurrage) | Charterer |
+| Bunkers | Owner | Charterer |
+
+Same steel, two prices, two completely different risk allocations. Converting between them is what a chartering desk does all day, and the conversion is never clean, because it requires a view on how long the voyage will actually take.
+
+That view is the whole argument:
+
+> **TRADER:** Sixty-six Santos, first half October. What's it costing me?
+> **CHARTERER:** Fifty-two on voyage. Or I put you on a Kamsarmax, time charter, nineteen five.
+> **TRADER:** Which one do I want?
+> **CHARTERER:** Depends who you think eats the queue at Santos.
+
+Neither of them called freight $52 and left it there. One number is a price; the other is a transfer of risk. Whichever is cheaper depends on the line-up at Santos in October, and neither of them knows the line-up in October. What they are actually negotiating is who carries that ignorance.
+
+### The arb, and the leg everybody leaves open
+
+Baltic route assessments this week put **P7**, US Gulf to Qingdao, at $73.81/t, and **P8**, Santos to Qingdao, at $51.98/t. That $21.83/t gap decides whose beans China buys far more often than the FOB differential does — 15 c/bu of origin discount is only $5.51/t, barely a quarter of the freight spread.
+
+Now the trade that actually kills people. Buy 66,000 t FOB Santos, sell the same cargo CFR Qingdao.
+
+| Line | $/tonne |
+|---|---|
+| Gross spread (CFR sale − FOB buy) | 74.00 |
+| Freight | −52.00 |
+| Finance, insurance, port | −6.00 |
+| **Margin** | **16.00** |
+
+Sixteen dollars a tonne is $1,056,000 on the cargo. Sell the board against the physical and flat price is gone. Both differentials are agreed in writing. The trade looks locked.
+
+Except the vessel is not fixed. Freight rallies $20/t before it is.
+
+```chart
+{"type":"waterfall","unit":"USD per tonne","title":"Santos to Qingdao, one Panamax",
+ "steps":[{"label":"Gross spread","value":74,"kind":"base"},
+          {"label":"Freight at 52","value":-52},
+          {"label":"Finance, insurance, port","value":-6},
+          {"label":"Margin","kind":"total"},
+          {"label":"Freight rallies 20","value":-20},
+          {"label":"Margin after","kind":"total"}],
+ "caption":"Freight is two thirds of the gross spread before a single dollar of margin is counted. A twenty-dollar rally on the unfixed leg turns 1.06 million dollars of profit into a 264,000 dollar loss, and the board never moved.",
+ "source":"Worked example, episode 10, freight from Baltic P8 Santos–Qingdao at 51.98 USD per tonne."}
+```
+
+The margin goes to **−$4.00/t**, a loss of $264,000. A swing of $1.32 m on a fully hedged trade.
+
+Is $20/t an outrageous move? Spread over the 66,000 t cargo and the 60-day round voyage, it is about **$22,000 a day** of extra hire — taking a Panamax from $18,964 to roughly $41,000, which is near today's Capesize level. The BDI has ranged between 1,261 and 2,845 over the past 52 weeks, better than a double. Twenty dollars is not a tail event. It is a bad quarter.
+
+### The position nobody writes down
+
+Here is the sentence worth keeping: **the moment a CFR sale is made and no vessel is fixed, the seller is short freight.**
+
+It runs both ways. Buy CFR and sell FOB and the position is long freight. Two trades can look identically flat on the grain and point in opposite directions on the ocean.
+
+The reason this hides is structural rather than careless. A position sheet has columns for bushels, lots, months and locations. It very rarely carries freight at the same resolution, and when it does, the exposure is often booked at the *expected* rate rather than marked to the index. A book that is flat in every grain column can be carrying seven figures of directional freight risk that nothing on the page names.
+
+**FFAs** are the answer, as far as there is one: cash-settled swaps on a Baltic index route or basket, over a calendar month. A short-freight position is covered by buying FFAs. But the hedge is an index built from a basket of named routes, and the exposure is one voyage on one route fixed on one day. The route can move against the basket, the fixing can miss the settlement window, and the tonnage never matches exactly. This is the cross-hedge problem from ep 5 — a Black Sea cargo hedged on Matif — wearing shipping clothes.
+
+Underneath the freight sits **fuel**. A Panamax burns roughly 30 t a day at sea, so a 60-day voyage is about 1,800 t of bunkers. A hundred-dollar move in fuel is $180,000, or $2.73/t on the cargo — seventeen percent of a sixteen-dollar margin, decided in the oil market. On a voyage charter the owner wears it. On a time charter, the charterer does, which is a large part of what the two quotes in that dialogue were really about.
+
+### Why merchants charter rather than own
+
+If freight matters this much, why does almost every merchant rent its tonnage?
+
+Three reasons, and only the third is about shipping.
+
+A ship is a **twenty-five-year asset** and a cargo is a sixty-day problem. Owning one to solve the other means holding a two-decade position to cover a two-month exposure, which is not a hedge — it is a second business.
+
+The merchant's edge is **knowing where the cargo is**, not knowing where the ship is. Those are genuinely different information games, played by different people, on different cycles.
+
+And shipping is more violently cyclical than grain. A trading margin financed by a shipping balance sheet stops behaving like a trading margin: the freight cycle's drawdowns are deep enough to constrain the working capital that the grain business runs on, at exactly the moments when grain opportunities appear.
+
+The houses that do own tonnage mostly own it for a narrower reason: to guarantee **access** on the days when access, not price, is the binding constraint. That is a real reason. It is just not a trading reason, and the distinction is worth holding onto, because it is the same distinction that separates owning an elevator from having a view on basis — which is Monday's subject.

package/ep10.script.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,127 @@
+Yesterday a Supramax bulk carrier earned twenty thousand six hundred dollars a day. ||| 0.35
+A Panamax, seventeen percent bigger, earned eighteen thousand nine hundred. ||| 0.5
+The smaller ship was the more expensive ship. ||| 0.7
+This is Soft Commodity Trading, episode ten. Freight: dry bulk and chartering. ||| 0.6
+And freight is where a hedged trade goes to die. ||| 0.8
+Thursday's tape first. ||| 0.4
+Corn was the clear winner. September four seventy-eight and three quarters, up five and three quarters. December five oh three and a half, up five and a half. ||| 0.4
+December corn is trading above five dollars. ||| 0.5
+Pro Farmer is still walking the belt, and the scouts keep finding less than last year. ||| 0.35
+Illinois corn came in at a hundred and eighty-four point two bushels an acre. Last year that state made a hundred and ninety-nine point six. ||| 0.4
+Below average in Indiana, Nebraska, western Iowa, South Dakota and Ohio as well. ||| 0.5
+Beans were narrowly mixed. November twelve thirty-six and a half, down three quarters of a cent. ||| 0.35
+Inside the complex, meal lost about one percent and oil gained about two. ||| 0.4
+Wheat crept higher. Chicago September six eighty-two and three quarters, up two and a half. Kansas City seven sixty-two and a quarter, up a quarter of a cent. ||| 0.4
+Weekly export sales were unremarkable. Forty-one million bushels of corn, sixty-six million of beans, fourteen and a half of wheat. ||| 0.6
+Now the geopolitical read, and today it is a shipping story. ||| 0.4
+Ukrainian strikes have made the Sea of Azov effectively unusable for Russian grain export. ||| 0.4
+The interesting part is the mechanism, because it is not the one people assume. ||| 0.4
+Azov is shallow. It is a river-sea trade, worked by small vessels of three to five thousand tonnes, drawing under five metres. ||| 0.4
+You cannot substitute a Panamax into that. The water is not deep enough. ||| 0.5
+So the grain has to be trucked or railed several hundred kilometres to deepwater at Novorossiysk. ||| 0.35
+And Novorossiysk has its own problems, which this show has covered. ||| 0.5
+What is missing is not tonnage. What is missing is a class of ship that fits. ||| 0.7
+Which is the entire point of today. ||| 0.4
+Freight is not a cost line at the bottom of a spreadsheet. ||| 0.35
+It is a physical constraint with a price attached. ||| 0.8
+Start with the fleet, because the sizes are not arbitrary. ||| 0.4
+Handysize, roughly ten to forty thousand tonnes. Supramax, around fifty to sixty. Panamax and Kamsarmax, seventy-five to eighty-two. Capesize, a hundred and eighty and up. ||| 0.5
+Those numbers are deadweight tonnes. D W T. ||| 0.35
+Deadweight is everything the ship can carry — cargo, fuel, water, stores, crew. So an eighty-two thousand deadweight Kamsarmax loads maybe sixty-six thousand tonnes of beans. ||| 0.4
+Never assume deadweight is cargo. ||| 0.6
+The classes exist because of one constraint above all others. Draft. ||| 0.4
+A fully loaded Panamax draws about fourteen metres. ||| 0.35
+Enormous numbers of ports, rivers and berths cannot take fourteen metres. ||| 0.4
+So you load less than full, which is called a part cargo, or you take a smaller ship. ||| 0.5
+There is a second constraint people forget. Cranes. ||| 0.4
+A Supramax usually carries its own gear. A Panamax usually does not. ||| 0.35
+If the discharge berth has no shore cranes, the vessel class has already been decided for you. ||| 0.6
+Now the screens. ||| 0.3
+The Baltic Exchange publishes a headline index, the B D I, and sub-indices for each class. ||| 0.4
+Yesterday the B D I was two thousand seven hundred and ninety-one, up fifteen. ||| 0.4
+Here is the unit moment, and it matters. Those points are not a price. ||| 0.4
+The Baltic surveys a panel of shipbrokers on a fixed basket of named routes, then converts the result into a time charter equivalent. ||| 0.4
+T C E. Dollars per day. That is the number a shipowner actually thinks in. ||| 0.5
+So: Capesize index four thousand three hundred and seventy-six, about thirty-nine thousand seven hundred dollars a day. ||| 0.35
+Panamax two thousand one hundred and seven, about eighteen thousand nine hundred. ||| 0.35
+Supramax one thousand six hundred and thirty-four, about twenty thousand six hundred. ||| 0.35
+Handysize eight sixty-seven, about fifteen thousand six hundred. ||| 0.5
+Look again at the middle two. The Supramax is smaller and it is earning more per day. ||| 0.4
+That inversion is not a mistake. They are different trades. ||| 0.35
+Panamaxes live on coal and big grain lots. Supramaxes live on minor bulks and shorter legs. ||| 0.35
+And U S Gulf Supramax routes have been surging while Asia Pacific has gone quiet. ||| 0.6
+So let us price a cargo two ways. ||| 0.4
+Sixty-six thousand tonnes of soybeans, Santos to Qingdao. Call the round voyage sixty days. ||| 0.4
+On a Panamax: eighteen thousand nine hundred a day, times sixty days, is one point one four million dollars. Divide by sixty-six thousand tonnes. ||| 0.4
+About seventeen dollars twenty a tonne. ||| 0.5
+On a Supramax you only load fifty-five thousand tonnes. Twenty thousand six hundred a day times sixty is one point two four million. ||| 0.4
+Divide by fifty-five thousand. About twenty-two dollars fifty a tonne. ||| 0.5
+Five dollars thirty a tonne worse. Thirty percent worse. ||| 0.4
+Higher day rate, fewer tonnes to spread it over. The penalty compounds. ||| 0.5
+So why would anyone ever take the Supramax? ||| 0.4
+Because the berth is nine metres deep. Or has no cranes. Or the buyer wants fifty-five, not sixty-six. ||| 0.5
+The vessel class is not an economic choice. It is a physical fact, and then the economics are whatever they are. ||| 0.8
+Two currencies of freight, and you must be fluent in both. ||| 0.4
+A voyage charter is quoted in dollars per tonne. You pay for the cargo to be moved and the owner carries the voyage risk — the weather, the speed, the queue at the berth. ||| 0.45
+A time charter is quoted in dollars per day. You hire the ship, and every one of those risks is now yours. ||| 0.45
+Same steel. Two prices. Two completely different risk allocations. ||| 0.5
+Converting between them is what a chartering desk does all day. ||| 0.6
+Here is how that sounds. ||| 0.4
+TRADER: Sixty-six Santos, first half October. What's it costing me? ||| 0.25
+CHARTERER: Fifty-two on voyage. Or I put you on a Kamsarmax, time charter, nineteen five. ||| 0.25
+TRADER: Which one do I want? ||| 0.25
+CHARTERER: Depends who you think eats the queue at Santos. ||| 0.6
+Notice what was actually said. ||| 0.35
+Neither of them called freight fifty-two dollars and left it there. ||| 0.35
+One number is a price. The other is a transfer of risk. ||| 0.4
+And the line-up at Santos in October decides which one was cheap. Neither of them knows the line-up in October. ||| 0.8
+Now the trade that kills people. ||| 0.5
+This week the Baltic assessed U S Gulf to Qingdao around seventy-three dollars eighty a tonne, and Santos to Qingdao around fifty-two. ||| 0.45
+Twenty-two dollars a tonne of freight advantage for Brazil. ||| 0.4
+That number decides whose beans China buys more often than the origin differential does. ||| 0.6
+So. Buy F O B Santos, sell C F R Qingdao. ||| 0.35
+Gross spread, seventy-four dollars a tonne. Freight, fifty-two. Finance, insurance and port costs, six. ||| 0.4
+Margin: sixteen dollars a tonne. On sixty-six thousand tonnes, just over a million dollars. ||| 0.5
+Sell the board against the physical. Flat price is gone. Both differentials are agreed in writing. ||| 0.4
+That trade looks locked. ||| 0.5
+Except you have not fixed the vessel. ||| 0.6
+Freight rallies twenty dollars a tonne before you fix. ||| 0.4
+Recompute. Seventy-four minus seventy-two minus six. ||| 0.4
+Minus four dollars a tonne. Minus two hundred and sixty thousand dollars. ||| 0.5
+A million dollar trade is now a quarter million dollar loss, and the board never moved a cent. ||| 0.7
+Is twenty dollars a tonne an outrageous move? ||| 0.4
+On sixty-six thousand tonnes over sixty days, twenty dollars a tonne is twenty-two thousand dollars a day of extra hire. ||| 0.4
+The Panamax index has traded between twelve sixty-one and twenty-eight forty-five in the last twelve months. Better than a double. ||| 0.5
+So no. Twenty dollars is an ordinary quarter in freight. ||| 0.8
+Here is the sentence to keep. ||| 0.4
+The moment you sell C F R and have not fixed the vessel, you are short freight. ||| 0.6
+Nobody's position sheet carries a freight column at the same resolution as the grain columns. ||| 0.4
+Which is exactly why it hides. ||| 0.5
+And it runs both ways. Buy C F R and sell F O B, and you are long freight. ||| 0.4
+Two trades that both show flat on the grain, pointing in opposite directions on the ocean. ||| 0.7
+Can you hedge it? Partly. ||| 0.4
+Forward freight agreements. F F As. Cash settled against the average of a Baltic index over a calendar month. ||| 0.45
+But you cannot hedge your ship. You hedge the index, and the index is a basket of routes that is not your route. ||| 0.45
+That is the same cross-hedge problem this show worked through with Black Sea wheat and Matif, wearing a different suit. ||| 0.6
+And underneath the freight there is fuel. ||| 0.4
+A Panamax burns roughly thirty tonnes of fuel a day at sea. Sixty days is eighteen hundred tonnes. ||| 0.4
+A hundred dollar move in bunkers is a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. About two dollars seventy a tonne on the cargo. ||| 0.4
+On a sixteen dollar margin, that is seventeen percent of the trade, decided in the oil market. ||| 0.5
+On a voyage charter the owner wears that. On a time charter, you do. ||| 0.7
+Last question, and it is the one that separates the desk from the textbook. ||| 0.4
+If freight is this important, why do merchants overwhelmingly charter rather than own? ||| 0.5
+Three reasons. ||| 0.35
+A ship is a twenty-five year asset and you have a sixty day problem. Owning one means taking a twenty-five year position to solve it. ||| 0.45
+Second, the merchant's edge is knowing where the cargo is, not where the ship is. Those are different businesses with different cycles. ||| 0.45
+Third, shipping is more violently cyclical than grain, and a trading margin financed by a shipping balance sheet is not a trading margin any more. ||| 0.5
+The houses that do own tonnage mostly own it for the days when access, not price, is the binding constraint. ||| 0.5
+Which is a real reason. It is just not a trading reason. ||| 0.8
+So, what to keep. ||| 0.4
+Vessel class is chosen by draft, gear and lot size — never by the day rate. Read the berth before you read the index. ||| 0.5
+Dollars per tonne and dollars per day are the same freight priced under two different risk allocations. Know which one you just agreed to. ||| 0.5
+An unfixed vessel is an open position. Selling C F R makes you short the ocean, and the grain hedge does nothing about it. ||| 0.5
+And the freight spread between two origins is often a bigger number than the differential everyone is arguing about. ||| 0.7
+Monday: storage, elevation and trade flows. Silos, blending off-spec cargoes into sellable ones, and why owning the bottleneck beats having a view. ||| 0.5
+The quiz is in the notes, with the solutions worked through. ||| 0.35
+Two on today, two on vegetable oils, two on the balance sheet, and a conversion drill. ||| 0.4
+Go and fix a vessel. ||| 0.6

package/feed.xml

@@ -18,6 +18,18 @@
       <title>Soft Commodity Trading</title>
       <link>https://storage.googleapis.com/podcast-audio-2647223968/index.html</link>
     </image>
+    <item>
+      <title>Ep 10 — Freight: Dry Bulk and Chartering</title>
+      <link>https://storage.googleapis.com/podcast-audio-2647223968/commodity-desk-daily/ep10.html</link>
+      <description><![CDATA[<p>Why the smaller ship can be the expensive one, and why freight is the leg of a hedged trade that stays open. Vessel classes, the Baltic indices, voyage versus time charter, and a Santos-Qingdao arb that dies when freight rallies twenty dollars.</p><p><a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/podcast-audio-2647223968/commodity-desk-daily/ep10.html">Read this episode, with the charts, the glossary and the quiz &rarr;</a></p>]]></description>
+      <itunes:summary>Why the smaller ship can be the expensive one, and why freight is the leg of a hedged trade that stays open. Vessel classes, the Baltic indices, voyage versus time charter, and a Santos-Qingdao arb that dies when freight rallies twenty dollars.
+
+Read this episode: https://storage.googleapis.com/podcast-audio-2647223968/commodity-desk-daily/ep10.html</itunes:summary>
+      <enclosure url="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily@1.0.31/ep10.mp3" length="9070893" type="audio/mpeg"/>
+      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily@1.0.31/ep10.mp3</guid>
+      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 05:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
+      <itunes:duration>755</itunes:duration>
+    </item>
     <item>
       <title>Ep 9 — Vegetable oils and biofuels</title>
       <link>https://storage.googleapis.com/podcast-audio-2647223968/commodity-desk-daily/ep09.html</link>

package/glossary.md

@@ -12,15 +12,18 @@ Units, conventions and desk expressions, accumulated as the show introduces them
 - **B50** — a blending mandate requiring 50 percent biodiesel in the diesel pool, the level Indonesia moved to in 2026  _(ep 9)_
 - **bag (coffee)** — 60 kg, how the coffee trade counts volume  _(ep 1)_
 - **balance sheet** — the one-page supply and demand statement for one crop and one marketing year, built so that supply minus use equals ending stocks and the page closes  _(ep 7)_
+- **Baltic Dry Index (BDI)** — the Baltic Exchange headline dry bulk freight index, a weighted composite of the Capesize, Panamax, Supramax and Handysize route assessments  _(ep 10)_
 - **bid** — the price a buyer will pay  _(ep 1)_
 - **bill of lading** — receipt, contract of carriage and document of title in one, whoever holds it owns the cargo  _(ep 4)_
 - **biomass-based diesel** — the RFS category covering biodiesel and renewable diesel made from fats and vegetable oils  _(ep 9)_
 - **blend wall** — the physical or warranty limit on how much conventional biodiesel an engine or fuel system will tolerate  _(ep 9)_
 - **board crush** — the processing margin implied purely by futures prices, meal price times 0.022 plus oil price times 0.11 minus the bean price, in dollars per bushel  _(ep 8)_
+- **bunkers** — the vessel's fuel, priced separately from the hire and carried by the owner on a voyage charter and by the charterer on a time charter  _(ep 10)_
 - **bushel** — volume measure standardized into weight, 60 lb for soybeans and wheat, 56 lb for corn  _(ep 1)_
 - **bushels per tonne** — about 36.7 for soybeans and wheat, 39.4 for corn  _(ep 1)_
 - **calendar spread** — the price difference between two months of the same contract, traded as one instrument at one price  _(ep 3)_
 - **cancelling date** — the last day of the laycan, after which the counterparty may cancel  _(ep 4)_
+- **Capesize** — a bulk carrier of about 180,000 dwt and up, too large for the Panama Canal, used mainly for iron ore and coal  _(ep 10)_
 - **carry market (contango)** — a curve with later months above nearer ones, the market pays for storage  _(ep 3)_
 - **carry-in** — stocks left over from the previous season, the starting point of a balance sheet  _(ep 2)_
 - **carryout** — ending stocks, the desk's one-word name for what is left at the end of the marketing year  _(ep 7)_
@@ -36,8 +39,10 @@ Units, conventions and desk expressions, accumulated as the show introduces them
 - **crush capacity** — installed daily processing volume, a physical constraint that cannot be expanded inside a marketing year  _(ep 8)_
 - **cwt** — hundredweight, 100 lb, the quoting unit for US rice and cattle  _(ep 1)_
 - **cwt (hundredweight)** — 100 lb, the quoting unit for US rice  _(ep 1)_
+- **deadweight (dwt)** — the total weight a vessel can carry including cargo, fuel, water, stores and crew, so always more than the cargo she can load  _(ep 10)_
 - **Dec over** — spread quoting convention that names the expensive leg, December fifteen over means December is 15 cents above the other month  _(ep 3)_
 - **deferred** — months or shipment windows further out  _(ep 1)_
+- **demand-to-supply ratio** — the Baltic measure of tonne-mile demand growth against fleet growth, above 1.0 when cargo is outrunning ships  _(ep 10)_
 - **demurrage** — the penalty owed when a vessel is held beyond the agreed laytime  _(ep 2)_
 - **despatch** — the reward paid when loading beats laytime, customarily half the demurrage rate  _(ep 4)_
 - **differential** — the premium or discount to a named futures month, as in November plus 80, the negotiated part of a physical quote  _(ep 1)_
@@ -45,6 +50,7 @@ Units, conventions and desk expressions, accumulated as the show introduces them
 - **discretionary blending** — blending vegetable oil into the fuel pool purely because it is cheaper than gasoil, with no mandate and no subsidy behind it  _(ep 9)_
 - **distillers grains** — DDGS, the protein co-product of ethanol production, sold back into the feed market  _(ep 6)_
 - **done** — the word that seals a trade  _(ep 1)_
+- **draft** — the depth of hull below the waterline, which rises as the ship loads and is the hard physical limit on which berths and rivers a vessel can enter  _(ep 10)_
 - **draft survey** — weighing a cargo by reading the ship's displacement before and after loading  _(ep 4)_
 - **draw area** — the geographic catchment a crush plant buys its beans from, whose size sets how hard it must bid the local basis  _(ep 8)_
 - **durum** — the pasta wheat, a separate species with its own thin market  _(ep 5)_
@@ -58,14 +64,18 @@ Units, conventions and desk expressions, accumulated as the show introduces them
 - **feed wheat** — wheat sold on energy and protein rather than milling specification, priced relationally against corn rather than at a flat price  _(ep 6)_
 - **firm** — a tradable quote that binds if accepted, often with a time limit  _(ep 1)_
 - **five percent more or less** — the contractual tolerance on cargo size, exercised at the seller's option  _(ep 1)_
+- **fixing** — agreeing the charter of a specific vessel, the moment a freight exposure stops being open  _(ep 10)_
 - **flat price** — the full outright price level  _(ep 1)_
 - **flat price exposure** — outright price risk, removed deliberately by hedging so only the basis remains  _(ep 2)_
 - **FOB** — free on board, the cargo is priced at the load port with the buyer taking it from the ship's rail  _(ep 2)_
+- **forward freight agreement (FFA)** — a cash-settled swap on a Baltic index route or basket over a calendar month, the only liquid way to hedge freight  _(ep 10)_
 - **front month** — the nearest actively traded contract month, where liquidity is deepest  _(ep 3)_
 - **full carry** — storage plus interest per month of holding grain, the practical ceiling on a carry spread  _(ep 3)_
 - **gasoil** — the traded middle distillate that diesel prices off, and the reference against which discretionary blending economics are judged  _(ep 9)_
+- **geared vessel** — a ship carrying its own cranes, which can therefore discharge at a berth with no shore equipment  _(ep 10)_
 - **Grain Stocks** — the quarterly USDA survey of physical inventories, from which the feed and residual line is backed out  _(ep 7)_
 - **gross processing margin** — the industry name for product value minus raw material cost, the crush stated as a margin  _(ep 8)_
+- **Handysize** — the smallest mainstream dry bulk class at roughly 10,000 to 40,000 dwt, geared and able to work berths larger ships cannot reach  _(ep 10)_
 - **hard red spring (HRS)** — the 13.5 percent plus Minneapolis wheat bought to lift the protein of a grist  _(ep 5)_
 - **hard red winter (HRW)** — the 11 to 12.5 percent bread wheat priced at Kansas City, the US wheat that competes with the Black Sea  _(ep 5)_
 - **harvested acres** — area actually cut for grain, roughly 8 million acres below planted for US corn, and the denominator that yield is quoted against  _(ep 6)_
@@ -104,7 +114,10 @@ Units, conventions and desk expressions, accumulated as the show introduces them
 - **oil share trade** — long soybean oil against short soybean meal, the clean expression of a view on a fuel policy because it isolates relative product value from the bean basis  _(ep 9)_
 - **old crop** — the marketing year now ending, priced by the contract months before the new harvest arrives  _(ep 7)_
 - **olein and stearin** — the liquid and solid fractions palm separates into when refined, sold into cooking oil and into fats respectively  _(ep 9)_
+- **P7 and P8** — Baltic Panamax route codes for US Gulf to Qingdao and Santos to Qingdao, the two assessments that set the soybean origin arb  _(ep 10)_
+- **Panamax and Kamsarmax** — the 75,000 to 82,000 dwt workhorse of the grain and coal trades, usually gearless and drawing about fourteen metres fully loaded  _(ep 10)_
 - **paper** — exchange futures and options, used by a physical desk to hedge rather than to speculate  _(ep 2)_
+- **part cargo** — loading a vessel below capacity because the berth, river or canal cannot take her full draft  _(ep 10)_
 - **physical (cash)** — real cargoes under contract with specs and load windows, as opposed to paper  _(ep 2)_
 - **plant crush** — what a physical plant actually earns, the board crush adjusted for bean, meal and oil basis and net of conversion cost  _(ep 8)_
 - **planted acres** — area sown, the number that moves on farmer decisions and USDA area surveys  _(ep 6)_
@@ -122,6 +135,7 @@ Units, conventions and desk expressions, accumulated as the show introduces them
 - **reverse crush** — the opposite position, short beans and long products, used when a processor expects to idle capacity rather than run it  _(ep 8)_
 - **RFS** — the US Renewable Fuel Standard, the rule that sets annual minimum volumes of renewable fuel that must be blended into American transport fuel  _(ep 9)_
 - **RIN** — renewable identification number, the tradable compliance certificate generated with each gallon of renewable fuel, at 1.5 RINs per gallon of biodiesel, which is why a mandate volume must be checked for basis before it is multiplied by a feedstock factor  _(ep 9)_
+- **river-sea vessel** — a small shallow-draft ship built to work both inland waterways and short sea legs, the only class able to load in the Sea of Azov  _(ep 10)_
 - **roll** — closing a hedge in one month and reopening it further out, executed as a spread trade  _(ep 3)_
 - **run rate** — the share of installed capacity a plant is actually operating at, the lever a crusher pulls when margins move  _(ep 8)_
 - **RVO** — renewable volume obligation, the share of the national mandate assigned to an individual refiner or importer  _(ep 9)_
@@ -133,14 +147,18 @@ Units, conventions and desk expressions, accumulated as the show introduces them
 - **statement of facts** — the port log of events both sides use to fight laytime claims  _(ep 4)_
 - **stocks-to-use** — ending stocks divided by total use, the market's tension gauge  _(ep 2)_
 - **substitution spread** — the price gap between two competing vegetable oils, which sets the point at which a refiner reformulates from one to the other  _(ep 9)_
+- **Supramax** — a dry bulk vessel of roughly 50,000 to 60,000 dwt, normally carrying its own cranes, working minor bulks and shorter legs  _(ep 10)_
 - **test weight** — the density measure telling a miller how much flour comes out of a tonne  _(ep 5)_
 - **tick** — smallest price increment, a quarter cent per bushel in Chicago grains, worth 12.50 dollars per lot  _(ep 1)_
 - **ticker** — the short screen code a contract is spoken by, ZW wheat, ZC corn, ZS soybeans, ZM meal, ZL oil, KC coffee, SB sugar, CT cotton  _(ep 3)_
+- **time charter** — hiring the vessel itself for a period at a price in dollars per day, with the charterer taking speed, weather, port delay and usually fuel  _(ep 10)_
+- **time charter equivalent (TCE)** — a voyage's economics restated as dollars per day, which is how a shipowner compares one employment against another  _(ep 10)_
 - **total supply** — carry-in plus production plus imports, the top block of a balance sheet  _(ep 7)_
 - **total use** — domestic use plus exports, the bottom block of a balance sheet  _(ep 7)_
 - **trade average** — the published mean of analysts' pre-report estimates, and therefore the expectation already contained in the price  _(ep 7)_
 - **trend yield** — the yield a crop would produce on normal weather, the baseline against which a weather premium is measured  _(ep 6)_
 - **variation margin** — the daily cash settlement of a position mark to market, paid the same day  _(ep 3)_
+- **voyage charter** — hiring a vessel to move a stated cargo between named ports for a price in dollars per tonne, with the owner carrying the voyage and delay risk  _(ep 10)_
 - **war-risk premium** — an insurance surcharge on a vessel's hull value for sailing into a conflict zone, quoted as a percentage  _(ep 2)_
 - **WASDE** — the USDA monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report  _(ep 1)_
 - **washed out** — offsetting trades cancel each other and only the price difference is settled  _(ep 1)_

package/package.json

@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 {
   "name": "@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily",
-  "version": "1.0.30",
-  "description": "Soft Commodity Trading - Ep 9: Vegetable oils and biofuels",
+  "version": "1.0.31",
+  "description": "Soft Commodity Trading - Ep 10: Freight: Dry Bulk and Chartering",
   "license": "CC-BY-4.0",
   "keywords": [
     "podcast",