it's been a few weeks since i last wrote on here, but i have been extremely busy, in a good way. i recently started writing fiction anonymously on a new substack account and it's been a lot of fun.

i've been doing more reading than ever before (both online and irl), which has been good but personally i can only be reading so much until i get the overwhelming urge to write. if you look at certain news articles, you'll learn reading rates are lower than they've ever been, and people just don't care to pick up a book anymore.

things like booktok and goodreads mitigate this a bit, but it's hard enough to get people to read, and most never even consider the fact that they can just write anything and post it. these posts on this site are never edited heavily, and mostly stream of consciousness thoughts. people should be doing this more, but it won't happen until they start reading and develop the urge.

a book ive been obsessed with since yesterday is 'the world for sale' by jack farchy and javier blas, which details the rise of commodity trading houses and how they accumulated power in the mid to late 20th century.

before yesterday i was somewhat familiar with a few of the most recognized names, like glencore and vitol, but hadn't known anything surrounding their rise to power. it was also the first time in a few years i'd bought a book digitally instead of going to a bookstore or waiting for amazon to ship it, because the topic just couldn't get out of my head.

reading books digitally is way easier than anything printed, and i think this is because my brain is just wired to read words on a computer screen more than it is paper in the real world.

i hadn't ever tested this theory before, but i'll start buying more books online and purchasing printed copies if i like them enough to add to my bookshelf. i read about 80 pages yesterday in probably three hours, which sounds a bit insane but the content is interesting enough that it flies by.

i got distracted and turned on the nuggets / suns game and the score is tied with less than a minute in the first half. i set a timer on my phone for 22 minutes so i can watch the rest of it as long as it's close.

the best part of world for sale is the explanation of how these commodity traders rose from very niche parts of the financial world to behemoths that were just as - if not more - important than the people running the economies of countries all around the world.

there's an example of this in a goodsread review for the book, that details marc rich's encounters with jamaica and how he ended up making a fortune off their bauxite and alumina (smelted to create aluminum). it does a pretty good job of getting you hooked, which did result in me buying it. im only three chapters in and looking forward to the rest of it and honestly unsure how there can be so much more material to carry the next 350+ pages.

i think that studying all types of markets is useful because you gain a better sense of how the pie is baked, or whatever the saying is. ive been pretty obsessed with studying venture capital lately and that shifted towards private equity, which was what got me into commodities in one way or another.

i was reading about OPEC and how this created a massive opportunity and a new type of market, where nation states with significant oil reserves finally gained the means to make money on it. i've only read a bit of 'the prize' which details the long history of oil in excruciating detail, but i'm most curious about how these nations went about for so long without OPEC. it feels like a massively missed opportunity, but it was also one that wouldn't have really worked out without the commodity traders.

if i were one of these nations in the 20th century sitting on a bunch of oil that powered the industrial revolution and cars, i would have not been selling a barrel for $2 each, and would have absolutely raised prices to whatever i wanted. i guess the birth of OPEC was accompanied by massive, massive increases in demand for oil and usage across every developed nation, but there could have been a lot more money making leading up to it.

but that's besides the point, because reading about oil and OPEC made me think about another increasingly coveted commodity: GPUs.

to be honest i have not done enough research on the topic as i should. i now have plans to write a longer report about this and have a ton of catch-up on semianalysis to do, but there are many ideas floating around my head.

i saw a good chart about big tech AI-related capex two days ago and was thinking about how this will most likely only continue to go up. there was also a tweet about a hypothetical ETF for