Braving the elements

For any civilian tempted to listen to the siren call of those gloriously responsible adverts suggesting that you too could join Dorothy, 59 years young from Ermelo, in working from home a mere four hours a week and making a small fortune thanks to the wonders of leveraged commodity trading, the only piece of advice is not to be tempted under any circumstances.

Here be dragons — and the most fire-breathing of the lot are the pros, who don’t dither around with relatively stable markets but instead don their special-forces bandanas and get stuck into the likes of cobalt.

This is a market that’s more volatile than a Parisian taxi driver on a hot day in August. And when you find a perfect supply and demand squeezebox such as there is now, it really lights the afterburners and heads per ardua ad astra.

The demand side is driven by cobalt’s status as a key ingredient in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars, a market that is coming of age with the first delivery of the Tesla Model 3 and the announcement that Britain and France will ban petrol and diesel cars completely by 2040.

Two-thirds of the world’s supply of cobalt comes out of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and to say that is a challenging environment is a bit like suggesting that Roger Federer knows one end of a tennis racquet from the other.

Moreover, Glencore controls approximately one-third of annual supply, so any manufacturer looking to secure long-term supply had better hop off to Switzerland with a fairly substantial chequebook.

The market for cobalt is more volatile than a Parisian taxi driver on a hot day in August