An ODE for predicting mol prices

An ambitious young feller could make a good living trading molybdenum if he knew just where the price of mol was headed. The problem, of course, is that the price of molybdenum shows odd fluctuations and is not particularly easy to predict. Here’s the trajectory (as charted by the London Metal Exchange) for the first three months of 2011.

My working hypothesis is that molybdenum prices can potentially be predicted with some degree of accuracy in advance, and that construction of a successful model is less daunting than would be the case for larger, more complicated commodities such as oil, gold and wheat. Fred Adams visited the office last month, and we took a crack at an initial formulation at a governing ordinary differential equation:

In the above, P is the mol spot price, D is worldwide demand, and S is worldwide supply. The last term on the right hand side is a stochastic forcing term — no crystal ball is perfect!

More explanation is, of course, in order. Stay tuned.

The North Campus Mineral Zone

If the global economy continues to grow, then energy use will also continue to grow, and that’s good news for the primary molybdenum producers. The strong correlation of the molybdenum equity names with one another is quite interesting, given the relatively low short-term correlation of the stocks with the molybdenum spot price. There’s a medium-duration long-short strategy sitting there to be exploited, I’m quite sure, but the details have yet to be worked out.

Of more pressing urgency is the matter of university finances. The state budget situation does not look good, so I’ve looked a little further into developing UCSC’s potential mineral resources.

As readers know, the UCSC campus sits astride a block of Salinian granite that contains mineralized gold-bearing quartz veins. The presence of the glittering metal in the folds of the pristine redwood-forested hills came to my attention through some notes in an 1890′s era California geological survey:

The website mindat.org lists the location of the Stribling mine as latitude +37 deg, 1′, 11”, longitude 122 deg, 2′, 60” W. This location is on an odd hairpin bend in the San Lorenzo River, located in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, just adjacent to the property line of the UCSC North Campus:

On the geological map, the hairpin bend seems to be associated with the Ben Lomond fault, which is a high-angle fault that has produced over 600 feet of vertical slip since the Miocene era. The fault runs through the Pogonip open space, and defines the very steep eastern border of the Campus, before continuing north into Henry Cowell Park.

One can only do so much with Google Earth and an Internet connection. Next step is to get out into the field and do some prospecting.