Javier Blas

“The commodity traders are arbitragers par excellence, trying to exploit a series of differences in prices. Because they’re doing deals to buy and to sell all the time, they are often indifferent to whether commodity prices overall go up or down. What matters to them is the price disparity – between different locations, different qualities or forms of a product, and different delivery dates. By exploiting these price differences, they help to make markets more efficient, directing resources to their highest value uses in response to price signals. They are, in the words of one academic, the visible manifestation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.”
― Javier Blas, The World For Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources

“Agricultural commodity traders, on the other hand, buy from thousands of individual farmers. That makes the traders’ job harder, but it also provides an opportunity: dealing with so many farmers gives the largest traders valuable information. Long before the concept of ‘big data’ became popular, the agricultural traders were putting it to work, aggregating information from thousands of farmers to get a real-time insight into the state of the markets.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources