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Not Digging It

John Goodell

BEFORE I BECAME a devotee of index funds, I began my investing journey in commodities, with a focus on commodity miners and producers. These firms extract a variety of goods from the earth, including precious metals like gold and silver, as well as energy-related commodities like oil, natural gas and uranium.

As a college student first studying the markets, I was drawn to the outsized returns that can occur in a commodity bull market. The cyclical nature of commodity super-cycles means their profits are epic—and so are the bankruptcies. In the end, I abandoned investing in commodities after a decade of unspectacular results.

Here are the five reasons I avoid the sector entirely:

  1. Commodity miners often engage in price-fixing that hurts consumers and destroys smaller competitors. When a few large producers dominate a market, they may act as a cartel to affect both supply and prices.
  2. Mining certain commodities, like uranium, can cause health problems to miners, most of whom are poor and desperately need the work to support their families. I discovered this when I recently read Max Chafkin’s biography of tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Thiel’s father worked as a uranium mining engineer in apartheid South Africa when Thiel was a boy. Black laborers reportedly were never told they were mining uranium. One advocacy group reported that workers were “dying like flies” from radiation. There are many such examples of indifference to miners’ health and safety, including a depressingly large number of coal mine disasters in West Virginia.
  3. Outside of Australia, the U.S. and Canada, nearly every commodity-rich nation is a human rights abuser. Look no further than the deplorable Russian actions in Ukraine, which are enabled, in part, by blood money paid for Russian oil and gas. Companies—and, by proxy, their investors—are, at best, forced to hold their noses at such gross misconduct and, at worst, seem complicit in criminal behavior.
  4. Many countries in the Middle East and Latin America have enacted laws that rob shareholders of their equity in commodity companies. In Russia, commodity-producing assets have been stolen twice. The first time was during the Communist Revolution in 1917. Then, almost from the moment the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Vladimir Putin, his oligarchs and the Russian government stole private investments in oil and natural gas companies again.
  5. Even when the best-run companies in Western-style democracies succeed in extracting commodities, the supply left in the ground drops. Unless new proven discoveries come on line to replace the diminishing reserves, their business success is finite. Investors with long-term horizons are betting that these firms will find quality replacements by discovery or acquisition, but this is anything but guaranteed.

Do my broadly diversified index funds own small percentages of commodity producers? Sure. But I’m comforted that these percentages have shrunk in recent years, and I hope they will continue to do so. I’m optimistic this trend will continue because I believe in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

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Steve Spinella
2 years ago

Commodity: a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee. Given its definition, commodities are the beginning of all industrial production. Not being blessed with divine fiat, there is not a company in the world that produces something out of nothing. Even the most esoteric software might be said to find its meaning in providing part of the [human] command and control over production, storage, transformation, and distribution of products [that started with commodities.]
One student suggested that we stop using hydrocarbons. Using less, as efficiently as possible, can and should be a current goal, but when you look around the room and only see hydrocarbons or things coated in hydrocarbons, it’s hard to imagine what world is being recommended.
Perhaps it’s a bit like the biodome, where everything needed was going to be self-contained. My recollection is that it turned out they were cheating from the beginning and eventually gave up the hoax, as they couldn’t even figure out how to live with recycled air, much less any other commodities.

Andrew Forsythe
2 years ago

John, this was very enlightening. Thank you.

John Goodell
2 years ago

Thank you, Andrew!

Bob Wilmes
2 years ago

Several years ago I worked for the largest copper miner in the United States. I can unequivocally state that our miners and geologists were never exploited at any mine we owned globally. My company built a $500 million dollar waste water treatment facility for a 250 square mile copper mine we developed in Peru. Modern mines of any scale require heavy infrastructure investment in rail sidings, roads and electric generation in order to mine at the scale of millions of pounds per day output. We brought in satellite links and Internet connectivity for villages of miners. There was never any price fixing as the company did not hedge the price of copper. We sold what we produced on a daily basis through commodities exchanges. Although mining is a relatively small component of US GDP it still creates excellent jobs and benefits in relatively rural areas.

William Ehart
2 years ago

Great piece John. Thanks.

John Goodell
2 years ago
Reply to  William Ehart

Thank you, William!

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