The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders who barter the Earth's Resources by Javier Blas and Jack Farchey dishes the details on the success of the top commodity trading firms over the last few decades. They will go where other will not and take huge risks that other will pass over to find deals and match buyers and sellers for large profits.
The book is filled with interesting characters, but overall, I am left without many details of how these traders were able to assess risks and gain a trading advantage. There is also too little on how these firms were able to exploit information dislocations in a competitive marketplace. Is it just greater risk appetite? Clearly, global upheaval and geopolitical restrictions allow for traders to profit from uncertainty, but there seems to be more to the story.
As an economist and investor, I want to learn about how profitable traders assess risk, deal with uncertainty, structure trades, and form repeatable success. Near the book's end there is an afterthought about information advantage, but the authors do not tie all the pieces together on how these commodity trading firms are successful. I enjoyed the stories, but I don't really know or care about these wildly successful traders.
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