Fergus Cullen

Fergus Cullen, known online as Trader Ferg, is a full-time trader and the author of the Trader Ferg Substack, a newsletter on contrarian investing in commodities and resource equities. His value to resource investors is a repeatable method: he hunts for asymmetric setups — trades where the realistic downside is small and the upside is a multiple of it — in commodity markets most participants have abandoned. Energy, thermal coal, uranium, fertilizers, and precious metals have all featured in his published work.

Cullen trades his own capital and documents his reasoning in public. The Substack, including its recurring "Ferg's Finds" series, lays out individual positions with the bearish case spelled out alongside the bullish one, and he is a recurring guest on resource programs such as Palisades Gold Radio. His appearances there cover themes like the commodities positioned to move in a Middle East conflict, the case for thermal coal on tight supply and rising Asian demand, and the profit power of the major oil trading houses. His verifiable record is this timestamped body of published analysis — he does not run a named fund — so readers can audit his calls call by call, but should not expect an externally managed track record.

His method pairs bottom-up valuation with a macro overlay. He favors cyclical commodities with structural supply constraints — sectors starved of investment capital for years — and sizes positions so they do not depend on perfect timing. Where a setup warrants it, he uses long-dated options, which cap the loss at the premium paid while keeping most of the upside; he has argued, for instance, that options on integrated oil companies such as Shell offer exposure to Brent crude (the international oil benchmark) and liquefied natural gas (LNG) while the companies' large, less-visible trading arms profit from volatility. He weighs exit strategy as heavily as entry, and much of his commodity outlook runs through a weakening-US-dollar thesis.

For mining and commodity investors, following Cullen is a study in contrarian process rather than a tip sheet: how the capital cycle — the boom-and-bust pattern of investment in commodity production — creates bargains, how to structure a position so that being early is survivable, and how currency moves and geopolitics feed into commodity prices. His current focus spans energy (oil, gas, and coal), uranium, fertilizers, and precious metals, with regular updates on the Substack and on X under the handle @trader_ferg.