Sugar futures are down about 20% in one month (ahem):

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Look at that contracting triangle last fall — it is a thing of beauty and foretold higher prices, especially since DSI was only 20% by the end.
Let’s put this in perspective:

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I was stopped out of my short from 29 cents at 24 last week after tightening [...]

These miners have been repelled by a previous support line from last year, after a kiss of death that I noticed last week:

Prophet.net

According to Bloomberg, the big bears are circling China.
Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, says China is overdoing it. “It does not make sense for China to build more empty buildings and add to capacities in industries where you already have overcapacity,” Faber told Bloomberg Television on Feb. 11. “I think [...]

The miners have been among the leaders since the bottom a year ago, with everyone seemingly sure that hyperinflation is right around the corner. The thing about commodities is that when they break an uptrend, they can fall hard and never look back (witness oil’s drop from $147 to $35 in six months).
If XME is [...]

5-year view of the ASX 200:

Source: Bloomberg
Australia has a huge property bubble that has yet to burst. The average home there, at AU$502,492, is priced at eight times average household income, compared to about three times income at the height of the US bubble (though higher in places like California and Florida). This is a country with [...]

Ok, cocoa is a pretty obscure market, but it tends to move with the rest of the commodities, which in turn behave like other risk assets including stocks and non-dollar, non-yen currencies. Cocoa futures, like copper, just broke out of the downtrend that contained their decline from the January highs:

Interactive Brokers

Copper is an excellent guage of animal spirits. It was one of the biggest winners of 2009 ($1.30 to $3.50) and one of the biggest losers since January (it fell to 2.80). Note that overnight it has broken out of and successfully tested the line containing its downtrend:

Interactive Brokers

Copper has been charting very well for the last month, almost spookily so.
1-month view:

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And the last week… we’ll see if it respects its channel and breaks that little rising wedge:

Source: Interactive Brokers

I follow all sorts of odd commodity futures, since the more you follow, the more set-ups you can potentially find. Cocoa got my attention a few weeks ago as it made a 30-year high on lower momentum than its previous high, and I took a short position when it stalled out at over $3400 per metric ton. [...]

Let’s start with the Wall Street line, courtesy of Bloomberg this week:
Demand will be strong next year as consumption gains in China, the world’s biggest metal user, said Andrew Karsh, a co- manager of funds for the Credit Suisse Total Commodity Return Strategy team, which oversees about $4.4 billion.
“Industrial metals are a favorite of ours,” Karsh [...]