@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily 1.0.4 → 1.0.6
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- package/covered.md +6 -0
- package/ep01.md +41 -37
- package/ep01.mp3 +0 -0
- package/feed.xml +14 -6
- package/package.json +2 -2
package/covered.md
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# Commodity Desk Daily — episodes aired
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Running log. Read before writing a new episode: avoid repeating material, and only make callbacks to episodes listed here.
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- **Ep 1** (Mon) — *What a Commodity Merchant Actually Does*: What a merchant does: three transformations (space/time/form); risk absorber with a balance sheet; ABCD + COFCO + Viterra/Bunge; physical vs paper, paper is the hedge not the bet; flat price killed by hedge, profit lives in differentials; asset-heavy = options + information machines; 1851 Louis-Dreyfus Alsace-Basel origin story. Vocab: flat price, basis, book, the screen, origination, execution, ABCD. Example: 66,000 t Santos->Qingdao cargo, +80 in / +175 out, freight 70, costs 10 = 15c/bu ~ $5.50/t ~ $360k, direction-neutral.
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- **Ep 2** (Tue) — *Flat Price vs Basis*: Flat price vs basis: cash price = futures + basis; quoting 'plus 80'; desk kills flat price via hedge; long the basis (physical + short futures) vs short the basis; basis moved by logistics, quality, urgency, farmer selling; basis risk as the chosen risk. Vocab: flat price, cash price, differential, plus eighty, hedged position, basis risk. Example: 66,000 t Santos cargo bought at Nov +80 — board -$1 hedged to zero (~$2.4M each way) vs +10c basis = ~$242k kept.
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# Commodity Desk Daily — Episode 1: What a Merchant Does
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# Commodity Desk Daily — Episode 1: What a Commodity Merchant Actually Does
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*Monday, August 10, 2026 · ~10 min listen*
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## Key takeaways
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- A merchant is **not** paid to predict prices. The job is transforming commodities across three dimensions: **space** (move it to where it's worth more), **time** (store it from surplus to scarcity), and **form** (crush, blend, refine it into what customers actually buy).
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- A merchant is **not** paid to predict prices. The job is transforming commodities across three dimensions: **space** (move it to where it's worth more), **time** (store it from surplus to scarcity, paid via carry), and **form** (crush, blend, refine it into what customers actually buy).
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- The merchant is a **risk absorber with a balance sheet**: the farmer doesn't want to carry price risk for six months, the crusher needs exact tonnage on exact dates — the margin pays for absorbing everything they don't want (logistics, timing, quality, price risk).
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- The
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- **Physical vs paper**: physical
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- Because the flat price is hedged from day one,
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- **Asset-heavy beats asset-light** in two ways: assets are *options* (your
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- The historic big four of grain trading are the **ABCD**: ADM, Bunge, Cargill, (Louis) Dreyfus — joined today by COFCO, China's state trader, and Viterra, which merged with Bunge in 2025. The business runs on massive volumes and razor-thin margins: 1–2% net in a good year.
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- **Physical vs paper**: physical is real cargoes with quality certificates and vessels; paper is futures and options — "the screen". Merchants trade huge volumes of paper, but to *hedge* physical positions, not to speculate. Paper cancels risk; it doesn't take it.
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- Because the flat price is hedged from day one, the profit lives entirely in the **differentials**. The worked cargo: buy FOB Santos at futures +80¢/bu, sell delivered Qingdao at futures +175¢ → 95¢ gross − 70¢ freight − 10¢ execution = **15¢/bu ≈ $5.50/t ≈ $360k on a 66,000 t cargo** — with zero opinion on price direction.
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- The space transformation is the industry's oldest: in **1851**, seventeen-year-old Léopold Louis-Dreyfus carted Alsace wheat across the border to Basel. Today the cart is a 66,000-tonne vessel and the road is Santos → Qingdao. Same trade.
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- **Asset-heavy beats asset-light** in two ways: assets are *options* (your terminal loads your cargo at cost exactly when capacity is scarcest) and *information machines* (elevators and vessels see the flows before the screens do).
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## Vocabulary
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| ABCD | ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus — the historic big four of grain trading |
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| Physical | The real commodity: cargoes, silos, quality specs, vessels |
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| Paper | Futures & options — standardized exchange contracts |
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| The screen | Desk shorthand for the futures market and its visible prices |
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| Flat price | The outright price level (e.g. the CBOT futures price) |
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| Basis | The local premium/discount over futures for real goods in a real place (Episode 2's subject) |
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| Origination | Buying from the producer end: farmers, co-ops, country elevators |
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| Execution | Everything after the trade: vessels, documents, surveyors, discharge |
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| The book | A desk's full set of positions, physical and paper together |
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| Asset-light / asset-heavy | Renting the supply chain vs owning elevators, ports, plants, vessels |
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| Elevation | Moving grain through a port elevator into a vessel (a fee-earning bottleneck) |
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## Market pulse (as of Friday Aug 7 close)
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Wheat led the complex: KC September HRW +14¼¢ to $7.14, Chicago September SRW near $6.40, on Black Sea tension and firmer
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Wheat led the complex into the weekend: KC September HRW +14¼¢ to $7.14, Chicago September SRW near $6.40, on Black Sea tension and firmer energy. Corn was pinned — Sep $4.39, Dec $4.62 — with the market waiting for **Wednesday's August WASDE**, where analysts expect a corn yield near 182.4 bpa. Soybeans drifted to ~$11.59 (Sep); China bought ~8.7M bu of beans and Mexico ~11.3M bu of corn. In softs, arabica sits near $3.15/lb with ICE-certified stocks at 2½-year lows; raw sugar trades around 16.5¢/lb.
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---
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## QUIZ — Episode 1 (today). No
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## QUIZ — Episode 1 (today). No J-1 / J-3 blocks: this is Episode 1.
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**Q1 — The
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**Q1 — The confident analyst.** A desk's research team becomes convinced — for good, well-documented reasons — that soybeans will rally $1 over the next quarter. A junior proposes: "Simple: buy futures and wait." Why is that *not* what a merchant does, and what would a physical desk actually do with that same view? Name at least two concrete expressions of the view that stay inside the merchant business model.
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**Q2 —
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**Q2 — Price the cargo.** A desk can buy soybeans FOB Paranaguá at November futures +65¢/bu and sell them delivered to a crusher in Vietnam at November futures +170¢. Ocean freight on that route costs the equivalent of 82¢/bu; port and execution costs 11¢. (a) Compute the net margin per bushel, per tonne (≈36.7 bu/t), and for a 66,000 t cargo. (b) The desk hedges on day one; during the voyage CBOT falls 80¢. What happens to that margin, and why?
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**Q3 —
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**Q3 — The rented edge.** An asset-light startup pitches: "We can do everything the big houses do — we'll rent elevator capacity, charter vessels voyage by voyage, and buy market data." Based on today's episode: name the two advantages of owned assets that renting cannot fully replicate, and — to be fair — one real advantage the asset-light firm genuinely has.
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## ▼ SOLUTIONS (spoilers) ▼
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**S1.**
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**S1.** Buying futures outright is a flat-price bet — the one game where a merchant has no structural edge: it's the most crowded, most liquid, most analyzed number on earth, and betting it puts the firm in competition with funds built for exactly that. It also isn't what the margin machine is for: merchant P&L comes from transformations, hedged. Legitimate expressions of a bullish view inside the model include: (1) originate more aggressively now — buy more physical at today's differentials (hedged as always), so the book is positioned for the demand that a rally implies; (2) time the *hedge placement and structure* within risk limits (e.g. which month to sell, when to roll) rather than running naked length; (3) buy storage/carry positions or secure logistics capacity that becomes more valuable if the market tightens the way research expects. The trap: "bullish" for a merchant should change *which transformations you do*, not turn the firm into a fund.
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**S2.**
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**S2.** (a) Gross: 170 − 65 = 105¢. Net: 105 − 82 − 11 = **12¢/bu**. Per tonne: 12¢ × 36.7 ≈ **$4.40/t**. Cargo: ≈ $4.40 × 66,000 ≈ **$291k**. (b) Essentially nothing happens to it. Both legs are priced *against futures*; the 80¢ fall hits the physical purchase and the short futures hedge equally and oppositely (≈ $1.9M each way on the cargo) and washes out. The margin was locked in the differentials on day one. What could still erode it: the costs and differentials themselves moving before being locked — freight before the vessel is fixed, the sale premium before the sale is done. (That residual risk is Episode 2's subject.)
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**S3.**
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**S3.** The two un-rentable advantages: **optionality** — owned capacity serves your own cargo at cost exactly when everyone needs it and rented capacity is scarce and expensive; the rented slot exists at boom prices precisely because someone else owns it — and **information** — elevators see farmer selling, terminals see lineups and congestion, vessels see delays, all before any screen or data vendor publishes it; a data subscription is by definition what everyone else can also see. The asset-light firm's genuine advantage: a tiny fixed-cost base — in bust years it simply walks away from rented capacity, while the asset owner still pays for staff, maintenance and capital on quiet terminals. Owning assets is buying a permanent option plus a private data feed, and paying for it in bad-year fixed costs.
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## The episode, in writing
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### Not paid to predict
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Picture a commodity trader and you probably imagine someone glued to screens, betting that wheat goes up. That
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Picture a commodity trader, and you probably imagine someone glued to screens, betting that wheat goes up. That picture is wrong — not slightly wrong, structurally wrong — and understanding why is the foundation for everything else in this series.
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A merchant does not get paid for predicting prices. A merchant gets paid for **transforming commodities** — in space, in time, and in form.
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**Space** is the oldest transformation, and one of the industry's founding stories illustrates it perfectly: in 1851, a seventeen-year-old named Léopold Louis-Dreyfus began buying wheat from farmers in Alsace and carting it across the border to Basel, where it was worth more. Buy where it's cheap, move it to where it's dear, capture the difference. A hundred and seventy-five years later the cart is a 66,000-tonne vessel and the Alsace–Basel road is Santos–Qingdao. Same trade.
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**Time** is the second. At harvest, grain floods the market and prices sag; by spring the flood is over, but the world still eats every day. A merchant buys at harvest, stores, and sells forward — not as a bet that prices will rise, but because the forward market usually pays a known spread for storage. That spread is called carry, and it gets its own episode this week.
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**Form** is the third. Nobody eats a raw soybean: crush it and you get meal for animal feed plus oil for cooking — products with actual customers. Blend cheap low-protein wheat with expensive high-protein wheat and you hit exactly the specification a miller in Algeria will pay for. Same atoms, new form, new value.
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Who pays for all this? Think of
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Who pays for all this? Think of a farmer in Mato Grosso: he grows soybeans brilliantly but has no vessel, no buyer in China, and no desire to carry price risk for six months. Think of a crusher in Shandong: she needs 66,000 tonnes, on spec, arriving the second week of October — not "whenever". The merchant sits between them and absorbs everything they don't want: the logistics, the timing, the quality risk, the price risk. That service is what the margin pays for. A merchant is, at bottom, a risk absorber with a balance sheet.
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### The players
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The historic big four go by four letters — **ABCD**: ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfus. Add the newer giants: COFCO, China's state trading house, and Viterra, which merged with Bunge in 2025. Between them, these firms handle most of the grain that crosses an ocean.
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The historic big four of grain go by four letters — **ABCD**: ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfus, the house that grew out of that Alsace wheat cart. Add the newer giants: COFCO, China's state trading house, and Viterra, which merged with Bunge in 2025. Between them, these firms handle most of the grain that crosses an ocean.
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The shape of the business is worth internalizing early: massive volumes, razor-thin margins. A net margin of 1–2% of revenue is a good year. The game is won on repetition and reliability, not home runs.
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### Physical vs paper
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Physical is the real thing: actual soybeans in an actual silo, with quality certificates and a vessel waiting at berth. Paper is futures and options — standardized contracts
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What surprises most newcomers is that merchants trade enormous volumes of paper, yet almost never to speculate. Paper exists to *cancel* the price risk of physical positions — hedging. Buy a real cargo of beans and sell futures against it: if the whole market drops a dollar, the cargo loses and the futures win, netting out to roughly flat. What's left is the margin you locked in for moving beans from Brazil to China.
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Physical is the real thing: actual soybeans in an actual silo, with quality certificates and a vessel waiting at berth. Paper is futures and options — standardized contracts on exchanges, what desks simply call **the screen**.
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What surprises most newcomers is that merchants trade enormous volumes of paper, yet almost none of it is speculation. Paper exists to *cancel* the price risk of physical positions — hedging. Buy a real cargo of beans and immediately sell futures against it: if the whole market drops a dollar, the cargo loses and the futures win, netting out to roughly flat.
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The
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The outright price level — the number on the screen — is called the **flat price**, and the hedge kills it. What's left is the local part of the price: the premium for real beans, in a real port, on a real date. Desks call it the **basis**, and tomorrow's entire episode is built on it.
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### The math of one cargo
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| Buy FOB Santos | futures + 80 |
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| Sell
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| Sell delivered Qingdao | futures + 175 |
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| **Gross margin** | **95** |
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| Ocean freight | −70 |
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| Port & execution | −10 |
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| **Net margin** | **15** |
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Fifteen cents a bushel sounds tiny — until you scale it. A tonne of soybeans is about 36.7 bushels, so 15¢/bu ≈ **$5.50/tonne**, and on a 66,000-tonne
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Fifteen cents a bushel sounds tiny — until you scale it. A tonne of soybeans is about 36.7 bushels, so 15¢/bu ≈ **$5.50/tonne**, and on a 66,000-tonne cargo that is roughly **$360,000** — earned with *no opinion whatsoever* about whether soybeans go up or down. Both legs were quoted as futures-plus-something; the flat price was hedged on day one, and Chicago can rally or crash a dollar during the voyage without touching the result. The money lives entirely in the plus.
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### Three words heard daily
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**Origination**: buying from the producer end — farmers, cooperatives, country elevators; the desks closest to the crop. **Execution**: everything after the trade is done — vessels, documents, surveyors, discharge — where a good trade can still die of a thousand cuts. **The book**: a desk's full set of positions, physical and paper together; managing it is the actual day job.
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### Asset-light vs asset-heavy
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Some trading shops own almost nothing — a desk, screens, and credit lines — and rent the rest. Asset-light is nimble but fragile: anyone can copy
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Some trading shops own almost nothing — a desk, screens, and credit lines — and rent the rest. Asset-light is nimble but fragile: anyone can copy a trade. The large houses sit on the heavy side: elevators, port terminals, crush plants, chartered fleets.
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Why own steel and concrete? Because **assets are options**: when export demand surges, your terminal
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Why own steel and concrete? Because **assets are options**: when export demand surges, your terminal loads your cargo at cost exactly when capacity is scarcest, while rivals queue and pay up. And because assets are **information machines**: elevators see what farmers are selling, vessels see which ports are jammed. You see the flows before they ever reach a screen — and that information gets paid in a very specific place.
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*Tomorrow — Episode 2: Flat price vs basis
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*Tomorrow — Episode 2: Flat price vs basis. The screen says one number; a cargo is worth another. The gap between them is where a physical desk actually lives.*
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<link>https://www.npmjs.com/package/@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily</link>
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</image>
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<item>
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<title>Ep 1 — What a Merchant Does</title>
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<description>
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<enclosure url="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily@1.0.
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<guid>https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily@1.0.
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<pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026
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<itunes:duration>
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<title>Ep 1 — What a Commodity Merchant Actually Does</title>
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<description>Merchants are not paid to predict prices. Space, time and form — the three transformations — and one Santos-to-Qingdao cargo that makes $360k with no opinion on price direction.</description>
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<enclosure url="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily@1.0.6/ep01.mp3" length="7520877" type="audio/mpeg"/>
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<guid>https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily@1.0.6/ep01.mp3</guid>
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<pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 05:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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<itunes:duration>626</itunes:duration>
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</item>
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<item>
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<title>Ep 2 — Flat Price vs Basis</title>
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<description>Why a physical desk kills the flat price within minutes, and what remains: the basis. Long the basis, short the basis, and a Santos cargo where the screen bleeds $2.4M while the book makes $242k.</description>
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<enclosure url="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily@1.0.5/ep02.mp3" length="7273197" type="audio/mpeg"/>
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<guid>https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily@1.0.5/ep02.mp3</guid>
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<pubDate>Tue, 11 Aug 2026 05:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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<itunes:duration>606</itunes:duration>
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</item>
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</channel>
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</rss>
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{
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"name": "@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily",
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"version": "1.0.
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"description": "Commodity Desk Daily - Ep 1: What a Merchant Does",
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"version": "1.0.6",
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"description": "Commodity Desk Daily - Ep 1: What a Commodity Merchant Actually Does",
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"license": "CC-BY-4.0",
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"keywords": [
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"podcast",
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