Commodity Market Guides | Metal Pilot Blog

Tungsten — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Tungsten is the metal that cuts every other metal. It has the highest melting point of any metal and, bonded to carbon as tungsten carbide, it becomes the working edge of nearly every drill bit, milling insert and mining …

Published Sep 27, 2026 71 min read Tungsten Base Metals Guide Commodity Guide

Cobalt — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Cobalt is the metal nobody sets out to mine. Roughly 99% of it comes out of the ground as a by-product of copper and nickel, which means the cobalt market’s own price has almost no power to call forth new supply — and …

Published Sep 20, 2026 63 min read Cobalt Battery Metals Guide Commodity Guide

The Oil & Gas Value Chain: Oil Sands (2026)

Alberta’s oil sands are the third way the world produces oil, and the strangest one: no exploration risk to take, no decline curve to outrun, and a barrel so viscous it cannot enter a pipeline without help. This guide is …

Published Sep 19, 2026 42 min read Oil and Gas Upstream Guide

The Oil & Gas Value Chain, Part 4: Oilfield Services (2026)

Every barrel that Part 1 of this series produces, Part 2 moves and Part 3 refines came out of a well drilled on a rig somebody else owns, lined with pipe somebody else rolled and fractured by a pump fleet somebody else …

Published Sep 15, 2026 58 min read Oil and Gas Oilfield Services Guide

Potash — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Potash is the commodity the world eats. The pink salt mined a kilometre under Saskatchewan and the Urals supplies potassium — one of the three nutrients every crop on Earth requires, with no substitute at any price — …

Published Sep 12, 2026 47 min read Potash Agriculture Guide Commodity Guide

Iron — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Iron ore is the raw material of steel, and so of every building, bridge, ship, car and machine on Earth. By tonnage it dwarfs every other mined metal: about 2.6 billion tonnes of usable ore were mined in 2025, and more …

Published Sep 6, 2026 85 min read Iron Base Metals Guide Commodity Guide

Platinum Group Metals — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

The platinum group metals market is the strangest corner of commodities: six precious metals rarer than gold, mined at scale in exactly two places on Earth, and consumed mostly by a single technology — the catalytic …

Published Aug 30, 2026 43 min read PGM Precious Metals Guide Commodity Guide

The Monetary System: Sovereign Debt Crises (2026)

The Monetary System series built up the machinery of government money — how a state spends and borrows (Part 1), how that debt is financed and priced in the bond market (Part 2), and how the central bank sets the rates …

Published Aug 29, 2026 120 min read Macro Sovereign Debt Guide Monetary System

The Oil & Gas Value Chain, Part 1: Upstream (2026)

Every barrel of crude and every cubic foot of gas the world burns begins in the same place: a hole in the ground, drilled on a geologist’s bet, into a rock that has held hydrocarbons for tens of millions of years. …

Published Aug 26, 2026 132 min read Oil and Gas Upstream Guide

The Monetary System, Part 3: Rates & Inflation (2026)

The first guide in this series explained why governments run deficits; the second, how they borrow. This one covers the institution that sits above both — the central bank. Since 2008, central banks have moved from quiet …

Published Aug 25, 2026 53 min read Macro Inflation Guide Monetary System

The Monetary System, Part 2: Bonds & Yields (2026)

The previous guide in this series ended with a government running a deficit. This one picks up the next question: how does it borrow the money? The answer is the government bond market — the largest, deepest financial …

Published Aug 25, 2026 41 min read Macro Bond Market Guide Monetary System

The Monetary System, Part 1: Spending & Debt (2026)

Every government does three things with money: it spends, it taxes, and it borrows the difference. Do that year after year and the borrowed differences pile into a debt — and across the rich world and China alike, that …

Published Aug 25, 2026 92 min read Macro Sovereign Debt Guide Monetary System

Coal — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Coal is the fuel the modern world was built on — and the one it keeps declaring dead while burning more of it than ever. In 2025 the coal market set another all-time record: 8.85 billion tonnes consumed, more than every …

Published Aug 23, 2026 47 min read Coal Guide Commodity Guide

The Oil & Gas Value Chain: World Oil & Gas Basins (2026)

Every exploration-and-production (E&P) company you can buy is, underneath the ticker, a portfolio of acreage in oil and gas basins — and the basin decides almost everything that matters: whether the barrels come out as …

Published Aug 21, 2026 79 min read Oil and Gas Upstream Guide

The Oil & Gas Value Chain, Part 3: Downstream (2026)

Every gallon of gasoline, every tank of jet fuel and most of the plastic in the room around you began as a barrel of crude that was useless until a refinery took it apart and put it back together. Downstream is the last …

Published Aug 18, 2026 91 min read Oil and Gas Downstream Guide

Nickel — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Nickel is the metal that makes stainless steel stainless — and the energy-dense heart of the nickel-rich batteries in long-range electric vehicles. No major metal market has been remade as fast: in ten years Indonesia …

Published Aug 16, 2026 88 min read Nickel Base Metals Guide Commodity Guide

Rare Earths — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Rare earths are the seventeen metals that make modern technology small, light and efficient — above all the neodymium magnets inside every EV motor, wind turbine, smartphone and guided missile. No commodity carries more …

Published Aug 9, 2026 50 min read Rare Earth Energy Metals Guide Commodity Guide

Lithium — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Lithium is the light metal inside every lithium-ion battery, and that makes the lithium market the most leveraged bet on electrification in commodities. The world mined 290,000 tonnes of it in 2025, excluding withheld US …

Published Aug 2, 2026 86 min read Lithium Battery Metals Guide Commodity Guide

The Oil & Gas Value Chain, Part 2: Midstream (2026)

Every barrel and every cubic foot the world consumes passes through a machine almost nobody looks at: three million miles of American pipe, a few hundred processing plants, a handful of salt caverns and a fleet of …

Published Jul 30, 2026 83 min read Oil and Gas Midstream Guide

Commodities Across the Cycle: A Macro Regime Guide (2026)

Most commodity writing treats each raw material in isolation, but investors hold a commodity inside a portfolio, during a particular economic weather system. The question that actually matters is which commodities work …

Published Jul 25, 2026 37 min read Macro Business Cycles Guide

Natural Gas — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Natural gas is the swing fuel of the power grid — it heats homes, fires industry and, in much of the world, sets the price of the marginal megawatt-hour. Unlike oil it has no single world price: the natural gas market is …

Published Jul 19, 2026 88 min read Oil and Gas Natural Gas Guide Commodity Guide

Silver — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Silver is the one metal that is both money and a factory input: in 2025 the world used 1,131 million ounces of it, and 58% went into industry — 187 million ounces into solar panels alone — while investors bought 218 …

Published Jul 12, 2026 92 min read Silver Precious Metals Guide Commodity Guide

Uranium — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Uranium is the fuel of nuclear power, and almost nothing else: in 2024 the world’s 441 commercial reactors needed 64,584 tonnes of uranium, and mines supplied 61,924 tonnes — 96% of it, with stockpiles and recycled …

Published Jul 5, 2026 83 min read Uranium Energy Metals Guide Commodity Guide

Copper — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Copper is the metal the modern economy is wired with: in 2025 the world used 28.2 million tonnes of refined copper, and 29% of the copper demand the IEA tracks already went into clean-energy uses such as grids, electric …

Published Jun 28, 2026 82 min read Copper Base Metals Guide Commodity Guide

Gold — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Gold is the oldest monetary asset still trading every business day, and in 2025 the gold market did something unusual: the price averaged a record $3,442 an ounce — 44% above 2024 and, after inflation, 45% above its 1980 …

Published Jun 21, 2026 87 min read Gold Precious Metals Guide Commodity Guide

Oil — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Oil is the single largest traded commodity on earth and still the backbone of the global energy system — and in the mid-2020s it is a market pulled in two directions at once, between OPEC+ quota discipline and record US …

Published Jun 14, 2026 115 min read Oil and Gas Guide Commodity Guide