Do you want to know how coffee prices really work? Are you prepared for the mental work it takes to really understand the answer?  In Part 1 of this series, we began answering the difficult question of how coffee prices work by breaking down trends and seasonality — the structural backbones of coffee price dynamics.   But on their own, they do not explain some of the extremes in coffee price action, for example, why markets overshoot. Nor do they explain false breakouts, or

Do you want to know how coffee prices really work?  Many coffee professionals spend years in the market without ever developing a deep understanding of how coffee prices actually work. And that’s perfectly fine: you don’t need to be a mathematician to have a successful career in coffee.   However, there is a statistical framework that describes the way coffee price dynamics work: time series decomposition.  This is not your normal casual social media reading. We’re going deep

The coffee market is at a turning point, transitioning from years of tight balances toward a more comfortable supply environment. At present, the inversion is still intense, and destination stocks remain historically low after being depleted by consecutive global deficits that drove high prices.  However, today’s historically high prices will be hard to sustain if the global balance shifts as most expect: a large Brazilian crop is approaching and could drive a meaningful surp

Read Part 1 here The CTA Cupping System  The Coffee Trading Academy Cupping System is a hybrid of the two methods we talked about in part 1 , that evaluates using a simple system across 4 categories.  The Four Basic Categories (Acidity, Body, Flavor, Defects)  The four categories evaluated are Acidity, Body, Flavor, and Defects.   Acidity is the tartness experienced on the sides of the tongue in a good, black coffee. There are different types of acidity, for example citric i