What's new
A running list of reports, tools and data added to Commodity Origins, newest first. For the data itself, see data status for source vintages or monthly changes for what prices did.
4 October 2026
- Eight new reports under Patterns: import dependency (who buys most of a commodity from one supplier), supplier shifts (who gained and lost importers' business), trade prices against benchmark prices, prices in euros, pounds and yen, whether some prices lead others, volatility over time, seasonality for every price and ten price ratios.
- The lead/lag and seasonality reports compare what they find with what random chance would produce, and say so.
- New: who consumes each commodity and which large markets depend on imports, from FAO food balance sheets, plus a report on whether El Niño and La Niña years move prices.
- Every commodity page now has a section showing what the Patterns reports say about it (who uses it, volatility, season, price in other currencies and more), and every country page has the same for the country.
- New: a page for each country and commodity where the country is a top-five producer or exporter, such as Brazil's coffee (production history, share of world output, export destinations, what it uses).
- New: a brief builder for up to five commodities and an optional buying country, printable as a one-page PDF; and a PDF summary of every country.
- Search can now be narrowed by kind of page (commodity, country, report, tool and more), and the data files now have an OpenAPI description and JSON schemas for developers.
27 September 2026
- Tidied up the navigation: the header and footer are now organized into clear groups instead of one long list.
- New: a FAQ page answering common questions about how the site and its data work.
- New: a CSV builder — pick any combination of commodities and a date range and download exactly the data you want.
- Your watchlist can now flag, and optionally notify you about, anything that has moved 5% or more since your last visit.
- The site can now be added to your phone or computer's home screen like an app.
- Price charts now mark a few more historical events (oil shocks, financial crises, wars) alongside the ones already shown.
- The site now tells search engines faster when a page changes (IndexNow), and Search Console / Bing Webmaster verification is wired up.
- The About page now names who publishes the site, and that author now has their own page.
24 September 2026
- New: a correlation calculator — pick any two commodities and see how closely their prices have actually moved together.
- Your watchlist can now generate a copy-paste digest of everything you have starred.
- The homepage now rotates through all 96 commodities over time instead of showing the same six every visit.
- Every commodity page now links to a one-page, downloadable PDF summary.
23 September 2026
- Prices can now be shown in EUR, GBP or JPY as well as USD.
- Each commodity has its own RSS feed for just its price updates.
- Added a one-click download of every commodity's data as a single CSV bundle.
- Price charts now mark a few major world events (the 2008 financial crisis, COVID-19, the invasion of Ukraine) where they fall in range.
- New map: which commodity category dominates each country's exports.
- Terms like "FOB" or "stocks-to-use" are now linked to their glossary entry the first time they appear on a page.
- New: a decade-by-decade map of where production has shifted since the 1960s, on commodities with a long enough history.
- New: a unit converter (tonnes, troy ounces, barrels, bushels and more).
- Added a manual light/dark mode switch, alongside the existing automatic one.
- Press "/" anywhere on the site to jump straight to search.
- "Surprise me" in the header jumps to a random commodity.
- "Report an issue" links on commodity and country pages.
- Share buttons on the trivia and price-guessing games.
- New: an HS customs-code lookup.
- New: embeddable price and production badges for other sites (see Embed).
- New: build your own commodity index from a weighted basket of prices.
- New: trade-flow diagrams showing which country sells to which, for every commodity.
- Commodity pages now link to the previous/next commodity in the same category.
- Added bilateral trade flows: who sells what to whom, country to country, not just each country's world total.
22 September 2026
- Five new country profiles on the blog (Chile, Australia, DR Congo, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia).
- Two new reports: export dependency and concentration over time.
- New: a price-shock timeline and a country comparison tool.
- New: a personal watchlist and a trivia game.
20 September 2026
- Eight new cross-commodity reports under Patterns: land vs yield, drawdowns and volatility, stocks vs prices, and more.
- New: a harvest calendar, embeddable charts, and weekly stats.
19 September 2026
- Launched the Patterns reports and a new fact every day on the homepage.
- New: monthly price-change reports for the last 12 months.
17 September 2026
- Added an automatic RSS feed for prices that move sharply in a month.
6 September 2026
- Commodity Origins launched: one page per commodity, with production, trade and prices, every figure sourced.
This page is written by hand and lists what changed for a visitor, not every internal change. For when the underlying data itself was refreshed, see the data updates feed instead.