Caterpillar (NYSE:CAT) reported Friday a surprising five-fold jump in first quarter profits, reaching an all-time quarterly record as the company benefits from […]
I found an interesting dataset at the IMF of commodity prices going back to 1980.
What makes it interesting is to look at the longer-term price trends of some of the industrial metals you don't often don't see charted, such as aluminum, tin, lead, zinc, and nickel.
With commodity prices up so much over the past several years, you can forgive long-term value investors for giving them a miss. Who wants to risk exposure to another asset bubble so soon after the dot-com implosion and the U.S. housing mess?
Silver is finally getting some attention in the 10th year of its bull market run - mostly top callers who are calling the recent move to nearly $50 an ounce a sign that it has already peaked. Interestingly, these same analysts were nowhere to be found when we made the logical argument that it would reach $50 an ounce this year.
Coal is considered the dirtiest of all fossil fuels due to the emissions of hazardous pollutants when burned. But we are at a point today where there is a scarcity of energy around the world, oil and gas prices are constantly rising and reaching new highs and energy consumption is showing no signs of slowing down.
If you’ve been long palladium, you know much of the ride over the last two years has been remarkable.
The white metal gained 350% in value between January 2009 and February 2011. It practically doubled in price in 2010 alone – the best performance of any commodity (followed by silver, corn and wheat).
Palladium investors were flying high.
After exhibiting few signs of life during much of the 1980s and 1990s, gold prices have revived during the last 10 years, climbing more than five-fold from the 2001 average price of less than $300 per ounce to more than $1,400 today. So what drove this massive increase in gold prices during the last decade?
