Skip to content

Home / Compare

Overlay fingerprints

Compare markets

Put up to four markets on the same ruler. The shapes do most of the explaining.

Market 1 Market 2 Market 3 Market 4

Cocoa 63 Extreme Concentrated supply and a thin deliverable float: the squeeze-prone shape of a market with nowhere for new supply to come from.
Nickel 63 Extreme The contract that proved an exchange can cancel trades after the fact. High barrier, high expertise, and a squeeze risk no other metal matches.

	Cocoa	Nickel
Exit difficulty	3	3
Volatility	5	5
Leverage	4	4
Carry cost	3	3
Fraud risk	2	2
Protection gap	3	3
Barrier to entry	4	4
Expertise needed	4	4
Difficulty	63 Extreme	63 Extreme
In a sentence	Grown almost entirely in West Africa by smallholders paid a fixed farmgate price, and subject to the most extreme commodity squeeze of recent years.	A stainless steel and battery metal, and the subject of the most extraordinary market failure in recent exchange history.
Unit	Metric tonne	Metric tonne
Smallest realistic trade	London contract of 10 tonnes	LME lot of 6 tonnes
Settlement	Physical delivery against graded stocks	LME prompt dates

The fingerprint measures how demanding a market is to take part in. It is not a rating or a recommendation.