Yesterday's WSJ had a brief article on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, which is going pretty crazy -- wheat prices are up about 350%, volume (in contracts traded) is up almost 50%, and prices for seats on the exchange are soaring. Just in case the stock market hadn't noticed yet, I looked up every brokerage I could think of to see if any had a major presence in Minneapolis, and might end up owning a chunk of the exchange if it went public or was sold to CME.
The closest I could find was MF Global, whose head of commodity research was heavily quoted in the article. MF, unfortunately, was too big a company for the wheat thing to be anything but a blip. Or so I thought. This has to be the best market-timing in history: on Wednesday morning, the Journal publishes an article about how great the wheat market is doing. It cites exactly one public company as a major player in the market. That very morning, someone at the company loses $141.5 million trading wheat.