The Strait of Hormuz has been described as the world's most critical energy artery, but in February 2026, that artery was effectively severed. As conflict between the US and Iran escalated, the closure of this passage didn't simply spike the price of oil — it broke the global supply chain for refined products in ways that have no modern parallel, not even the 2022 Ukraine crisis. 2022 vs 2026 The 2022 Ukraine energy crisis was severe, but its oil impact was one of trade redir

Precious metals like gold and silver are often viewed primarily as monetary assets, leading many investors to monitor the gold-to-silver ratio to gauge relative value. While silver is historically more volatile than gold, it is prone to aggressive rallies where it overshoots, as seen in 1998, 2011, and the recent surge over the last few months. Source: FactSet However, unlike gold, silver’s trajectory is also dictated by its heavy industrial footprint. In 2025, industrial use

The gold-to-oil price ratio is often viewed as a unique indicator of global economic conditions and market sentiment. It captures the ongoing ‘tug-of-war’ between gold as a safe-haven monetary asset and oil as a key industrial commodity. Historically, elevated gold–oil ratios have coincided with periods of economic stress, heightened uncertainty, and defensive investor positioning. Conversely, a low ratio tends to occur during periods of strong economic expansion, when energy

For decades, base metals such as copper, aluminium, nickel, zinc, and lead traded as a reflection of global growth. Prices typically moved in lockstep with industrial activity and were closely correlated with global growth proxies such as oil and iron ore. This relationship held remarkably well across multiple cycles, including China’s industrialisation, the post-GFC recovery, and the post-COVID rebound. But something changed in 2024. In my earlier work on an AI-driven commod

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 was a defining moment in history. Within months, it accelerated a full-blown AI arms race and triggered an unprecedented concentration of capital expenditure into compute infrastructure. Over the past three years, major hyperscalers have announced plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in data centres, chips, networking and power systems. This scale of spending is now powerful enough to break decades-old relationships across glo

For fifteen years, the United States enjoyed the cheapest natural gas on the planet. Henry Hub gas prices averaged below $3/MMBtu for most of the 2010s and frequently traded under $2.50 for long stretches between 2016 and 2021. That abundance rewired America’s electricity system – natural gas use for electricity grew 25% since 2010 and now accounts for 43% of total US generation capacity.   That golden era is about to come to an end. Three powerful forces are colliding at the

Brave New World: Flows versus Fundamentals Valuation bubbles are euphoric but fleeting, driven by short-lived speculative flows. The 2000 Dot-com boom (December 1998 to February 2000) and the 2021 COVID surge (March 2020 to January 2021) each lasted around 12 months before the speculative herd ran out of steam. These episodes drove unsustainable valuation spikes, illustrating how speculative flows can rapidly inflate stock valuations to stratospheric heights before swiftly di

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is in the midst of a valuation bubble, defying the principle that long term stock returns are driven...

In 49 BC, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River, sparking a civil war that ended the Roman Republic – a moment now synonymous for...

Stock market history is punctuated by dramatic periods of exuberant optimism (booms) and deep pessimism (busts). These cycles are...