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The Cocoa Short Squeeze: Why Cocoa is Trading like Meme Stock


Transcript

This is the big news in the commodity markets right now is this parabolic spike in cocoa prices. Cocoa is moved in price from about 2000 bucks a ton, which is where it normally trades at to $10,000 a ton. So here's all the cocoa production 73% of its in Africa, mostly in Ghana and Ivory Coast cocoa is grown from the cacao tree when you eat a Hershey's bar, for example, 11% of that bar is ground up cocoa powder.

So in Q4 of last year, El Nino spiked like crazy. And that caused a lot of rainfall to hit the west coast of Africa. And as a result, this fungus was spread in cocoa trees, there's a fungus called black pod disease. So now if you look at the cocoa production out of Ghana, you can see that we've seen a 50% rough decline in cocoa production.

So when that happened, everyone started to corner in the market, and then all the short sellers got squeezed and it causes big parabolic jump in price chocolate companies, they're talking about cutting the size of their chocolate bars, raising prices and starting to use other ingredients. So you'll start to see that happen in the shelves in the next couple of months.