IN 2005, K. Geert Rouwenhorst and Gary B. Gorton, now finance professors at Yale, published a paper about the investment benefits of an asset class that was then the province of specialists: commodities.
Funds that focus on health care, financial services, technology and communication were among the strongest performers, while specialists in commodities and natural resources were conspicuously weak.
"So," he explains, "our shoes have moved from being mass-commodity items to being specialist and different".In that sort of market, argues Mr Loake, the only way to go is to make shoes better rather than cheaper.
Tate has also decided to sell most of its European bulk ingredients businesses to its joint venture partner, to move away from commodity products to more specialist ingredients, and will receive around €240m when the deal completes in the summer.
As such, it builds on past management thinking, including business process re-engineering (with its emphasis on breaking a business down to its component parts in order to streamline the processes) and outsourcing (with its focus on highlighting core strengths and hiving the more commodity-like facets to specialist providers).
The Blue Jays have a known commodity in senior faceoff specialist Drew Kennedy, who ranked 14th in the nation with a.590 winning percentage and ninth with 132 ground balls.
The fall of the dollar has contributed to the surge in commodity prices, many specialists say.
The ruling is "a dark cloud" for the many agencies with commodity accounts, said Rick Kurnit, a specialist in advertising law who is a partner at the law firm of Frankfurt, Garbus, Kurnit, Klein & Selz in New York.
"We have entered a new chapter in the history of the oil market, which is now starting to operate like any non-cartel commodity market," says Stuart Elliott at energy specialist Platts.
"Specialist commodity managers, like Diapason Commodities Management and the Tiberius Group, are able to avoid many of the pitfalls of passive commodity investment and invest where they see value on a long only and long-short basis," he says.
