TWEETING UP A STORM!
Virtually all living creatures communicate in some form or other. The basic methods of sound, movement and colour has been expanded by humans who have added language and, therefore, the written word.
The need to communicate with many humans often at great distances has meant many methods to communicate with language have been devised. From talking to twitter.
One could argue that communication is prerequisite for virtually all businesses. In the commodity world no trader or broker would survive long without a plethora of ways to communicate.
The devices of communication have probably changed more over the past hundred fifty years than anytime over the past millennia and this has accelerated over the past 20 years. This, in turn, has changed the way business is done and no more so than in the trading and broking of commodities.
Back in the day, the telephone was a fixed line and to make a call from some of the more exotic places in the world meant queuing at the local telephone exchange. Indeed the telex was probably the most reliable form of communication. Some traders used even more antiquated means to communicate with their brokers. I remember one particular grain farmer who used to send his orders on a postcard at the beginning of each season.
Of course one could argue it was not in the interest of trade houses for information to be too readily available to their clients. It is probably fair to say that great liberties were taken by the trade in the days before the mobile telephone and internet. I am told that in 1976, the morning after a devastating frost hit the Brazilian coffee crop that one particular trade house, who had an office in Minas Gerais, was able to hoover up all
the outstanding offers for spot coffee across Europe as no one was aware that a frost had hit the trees. Today, one can watch a webcam of coffee trees to see whether a frost impacts.
More cynically it was, of course, in traders’ interests to keep origin in the dark when it came to prices and movement in price. Coffee farmers in Kenya were lucky if the village had a radio so they could hear the closing prices on the World Service. Generally, they had to rely on communication with the foreign buyers, who, somewhat understandably, were often economic with the truth. Nowadays, delayed prices of no more than 15 minutes are just an app away on the ubiquitous smart phone. The advent of the mobile phone has been a God-send to third world countries who could not afford to develop their land-line systems.
Fast forward to 2017 and the world is one big communication hub. Over half the world’s population have access to the internet – some 3.2 billion people. A Brazilian cane grower can maintain a blog on his crops while a Vietnamese coffee farmer can send tweets about the flowering of his trees. News is virtually instantaneous. A coup in a West African cocoa country is now streamed real-time. Twitter groups share and spread news much quicker than Reuters or Bloomberg. Social media is huge and will continue to grow exponentially.
The huge increase in speed of communication has allowed the financial and commodity markets to develop and change considerably over the past couple of decades. The ability to communicate and send orders electronically to a virtual market has seen the
14 | ADMISI - The Ghost In The Machine | November/December 2017
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