Orange Juice and Hurricanes: When Trading Places Became Reality
If you have seen the 1983 movie Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, you remember the final scene. The trading floor of the New York commodity exchange. Two old millionaires trying to corner the frozen orange juice market. Total chaos. People yelling, waving paper, sweat everywhere. That scene was fiction, but the commodity was real. Frozen concentrated orange juice is traded on NYMEX, and the price can move violently when nature decides to get involved. Chapter 23 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells what happened when the most destructive hurricane seasons in recorded history hit the real orange juice market. The price quadrupled. And unlike the movie, nobody was laughing.