CONTRARIAN • MONEY & INVESTING
By William Baldwin
CONTRARIAN • MONEY & INVESTING
20
Photograph by Franco Vogt for Forbes
Playing the Fields SAL GILBERTIE sells down-to-earth inflation hedges: funds that hold futures contracts on crops like corn and soybeans.
T
The dollar is weak, the world is hungry and the Russians are making a mess of the grain markets. Would you be interested in a foodbased inflation hedge? Sal Gilbertie, farm-family scion turned money manager, has just the thing. His Teucrium Trading offers pure-play exchange-traded funds that hold futures positions in corn, wheat, soybeans and sugar. When the conditions are right, these things add quite some spice to your portfolio. In the space of four weeks beginning just before the invasion of Ukraine last year, Teucrium Wheat zoomed up 65%. Over the past three years the soybean ETF is up 92%, the sugar fund 162%. Of course, agricultural commodities can sink just as easily. Wheat has given up all last year’s gain. Beans and sugar fared very poorly over the decade of low inflation that preceded the pandemic. Why subject yourself to such uncertainty? To get diversification. Farmer-Financier At his greenhouse-adjacent office in Easton, Connecticut, commodities trader Sal Gilbertie keeps an eye on crop production—and on ethanol demand, which has a lot to do with corn prices in the U.S. and sugar prices in Brazil.
F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.C O M
JULY 2023
