Podcast #29: Shawn Hackett - soft commodities

In today's episode, Marcelo López spoke to Shawn Hackett, president of Hackett Financial Advisors, a company that specializes in providing advice for farmers and hedgers about soft commodities, based on analysis and forecasts of climate cycles. Hackett Financial Advisors helps traders and producers make decisions in agricultural commodities in order to better conduct their business. Shawn initially discusses global warming and climate change, issues that have been around for some years. He argues for the non-anthropogenic factors that historically influence the planet's climate, in contrast to the view that the human factor is paramount. Hackett explains how solar cycles work, how long each cycle is, the impact that changes in the sun bring to Earth, what sunspots are, what they represent in terms of physical phenomena and how solar winds affect our planet. Shawn comments on the importance of understanding and monitoring solar cycles for agricultural commodities and how reliable these cycles are. From an historical perspective, he links these cycles to geopolitical and economic events and also to food production abundance and scarcity. Hackett explains that the sun rotates around the centre of mass of the solar system and not around itself, as one might think. He then correlates this characteristic with the influence that solar activity has on the planet Earth under given circumstances. According to him, other variables are also important to understand the climate and the changes to which it is subject. He talks about the temperature of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and their own cycles and how these cycles, associated with solar cycles, impact the climate in the world. Shawn also talks about the El Niño and La Niña phenomena and their relevance to the climate. Shawn talks about the moment we are in in relation to solar cycles and ocean temperatures, and the effects that they will have on planet Earth. Hackett also talks about the existing technologies to deal with adversities in agricultural production and comments on which commodities producers and traders should seek exposure to at this time.