What they don’t teach you at business school
Retired metal merchant, Anthony Lipmann, illuminates trading for the young entering the world of metals.
Have I said this before? ‘Concentrate on the kgs, and the tons will follow’. This may be superannuated advice but why shouldn’t Gen Z listen to Baby Boomer wisdom?
I know it’s a counterintuitive, unsexy, lame, and potentially boring fact – but if you want to grow a business rather than steal one, you need to start with the little stuff and work your way up. You never know, you might become an expert in something you never dreamt of …
So – strontium. Who trades strontium?
Peace badges ©Anthony Lipmann
If you’ve heard of it at all, it might be because it’s ugly sister isotope is Strontium 90, rumoured to be a contaminant in children’s milk in the 1950s. Windscale (more positively renamed Sellafield) had the misfortune to have a nuclear melt down in Cumberland in 1957 (the year of my birth). It was of course the same year ERNIE launched his Premium Bonds, and the same year Sputnik circumnavigated the Earth at a low orbit, putting the fear of God into Granny in the Giles cartoons of that year.
She wasn’t the only one. My godfather, Eric Austen (1922- 1999), who created the first lapel badges of the peace sign in ceramic for the Second Aldermaston March in 1959, worried himself sick. He wrote to the head of his daughter’s primary school on 1st November 1961:
Dear Sir,
I should be grateful if you would allow my daughter Gea, not to have her milk allowance at school. I gather that the radioactive fallout in milk has now reached what is considered the danger level (if it stays that way for a year). For this reason I do not wish my child to imbibe her third of a pint.
Yours faithfully , etc.
Strontium before packing © Lipmann Walton
I am happy to say the non-isotope of strontium metal is not particularly dangerous. It is made from a mineral called celestine which is milled and calcified in a great rotary kiln before being aluminothermically smelted. Because it is so prone to oxidise in air like calcium (with a tendency to decompose into ash) the trick is to then pack its fibrous metal strands tight into hermetically sealed aluminium cans or pouches, to shield it from the atmosphere. The old Soviet method was to sink the pieces into oil.
So, when I obtained an enquiry for a few kilos of Sr metal, I was unreasonably excited. I wasn’t rich enough to turn down an enquiry for kilo of anything. An end-user seeking metal for a new application was to be cherished; and if they’d reached me, it meant they’d tried everyone else.
But where to obtain a sufficiently small quantity of an unusual minor metal (at that time not covered by MMTA standards) without scouring the globe?
The only answer was to hunt for it amongst friendly local consumers who could be induced to part with a drum ̶ the smallest drum possible ̶ which turned out to be 100 kgs.
When I reported back, my new best customer was both gratified and surprised I’d found it. So ̶ with his agreement to purchase ̶ all I had to do was go and collect it. This I did by driving west and throwing the drum onto the back seat of my old BMW ̶ then driving north through the counties for another five hours, reaching the plant just as the security guards were closing up for the night.
The consumer seemed to like it, and next ordered a ton, and then 20 mt. Soon we were supplying several hundred tons per year.
My message to the younger trader hoping to be a big shot, is to suggest you should never disdain an enquiry ̶ even a small one. You never know what you could learn.
I had seen many enquiries turned down when I worked for a wealthy London company in my prime, and I didn’t want to do the same. And it helped, not having enough funding, that I didn’t have the luxury of being able to do so anyway.
Acorns into oak trees, kilos into tons. It’s a business lesson and a fact. But they just don’t teach you how to trade strontium at Harvard Business School ̶ that one you have to work out for yourself.
by Anthony Lipmann
